


it's us, always us

by revecake



Category: GOT7
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Break Up, Dirty Talk, Dom/sub Undertones, Explicit Sexual Content, Extremely Dubious Consent, First Meetings, Getting Together, M/M, Rough Sex, Unhealthy Relationships, choreographer jaebeom, idol jinyoung
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:14:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25744933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revecake/pseuds/revecake
Summary: It’s in Jinyoung’s eyes. That thing, that magnetism that saysi’m perfectandyou won’t be able to let go of someone like me again.And he’s right. Jaebeom lays his own eyes on him and he’s ruined for life.-the get-together and the inevitable fallout afterwards
Relationships: Im Jaebum | JB/Park Jinyoung
Comments: 40
Kudos: 49





	1. jaebeom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the beginning of you (it’s you)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please imagine jy's idol discography here as a mix between taemin's all about you and jjp's coming home

Jinyoung is the perfect guy. He smiles whenever he sees Jaebeom’s cats, his own eyes creasing into whiskers. And when Jaebeom lets himself laugh, _really_ laugh, Jinyoung never shies away from how wide he opens his mouth, how his teeth bite into the air. In response to Jaebeom’s brashness, Jinyoung’s quiet smile echoes in its intensity. 

He’s just tall enough for Jaebeom to rest his arm around his shoulder, and Jaebeom can tell, beneath those layers of creamy sweaters and pressed shirts is a trim waist, a sturdy backside. The kind he’d like to tuck his palm into and feel the curves fit to his fingers, bare skin and soft soap. 

Jinyoung is exactly Jaebeom’s type, down to every detail. He’s perfect, and somewhere down the line, it all goes so, so wrong. 

-

Jaebeom meets Jinyoung while idling in the dance studio. 

His manager is playing him a demo clip of the idol’s newest song, and the smooth voice echoes in the cool mirror against his back. 

Jinyoung enters himself a moment later. Opening the door, catching it for a pause before closing it with a ducked bow. He’s late but only by a few minutes. 

His eyes stop on Jaebeom. Flicker, a professional smile. 

“Hello, I’m Jinyoung.” Another bow. His sweeping hair, the cut boy groups go for when they have to be practical but just slightly shy of pretty, falls into his round eyes. He pushes it back with a practiced motion, airport fashion handsome. 

“I’ll be in your hands for the choreography of _Stuck on You_ \- please take care of me.” 

Jaebeom offers a hand. Jinyoung’s voice from the fading playback meets the real sound in the middle. It’s a tender R&B track with enough of a steady background beat for a dance to be paired with it. The lyrics are from the perspective of something like a sensitive man in love.

All in all, it’s not bad though.

“JB. Let’s work well together.” 

_maybe i should’ve held you closer_

“-and 1,2 - roll, step, and _down_ — ”

Jinyoung finishes the last two counts on his own, and Jaebeom watches. It’s a dance that calls for a mic stand, and even with the extra prop, Jinyoung is all perfunctory movement, trained to end on beat and not linger a second longer. 

There’s really nothing more to say. Jaebeom thinks he could make his crowd of blushing fangirls scream regardless, and if his job is simply to make sure Jinyoung can perform to standard, then he wonders why they had to meet in the first place. 

Jinyoung is pure class. Fine, exemplary even.

Jaebeom can see that he’s got years of training in slight, toned muscle. But there’s technique, and then there’s the _feeling_.

It’s the same as _ambition!!_ , as Jackson would so enthusiastically put it. 

Jaebeom won’t be so blind as to how often the industry burns out fresh idealism. He’s spent his fair share of nights letting the overhead ceiling lights sear into his glazed eyes, where his knees had felt locked beyond the joint from hours of doing one dance over and over again. 

In the end, it’s his job - and he likes it. The traces of himself behind the flashing smiles and practiced eye contact on a stage miles away from his lone studio. 

Jinyoung moves and he ends perfectly on each beat. Jaebeom wants to see him fill out the notes, maybe even push over, loosen and blur a bit until it matches the tender heat of the song. 

They’ve still got time, and the practice film is rolling. It _could_ count as future reference.

So, Jaebeom steps right into Jinyoung’s space and begins the count again:

Jinyoung’s face barely betrays his surprise. It’s not even about the dance at this point, Jaebeom just wants to see him break a little. Be more than an image in the unsullied mirror.

“Try doing it like this - 1,2 heel down, here. Roll, and - just pretend like it’s a partner dance.” 

Jinyoun follows dutifully, and their chests practically meet in the middle. The black mic stand is the only thing cutting a stark line between them. He stares up at Jaebeom, the most minute difference, but it’s searing, spilling over in intensity. 

Jaebeom steps closer, their legs overlapping. “-3,4. I want you to feel it more.”

Jinyoung finishes the rest of the chorus again as Jaebeom extricates himself in a quick 1,2 step. It’s better, maybe a hint of a lingering shoulder to his body roll and the eye contact is serious this time. 

But Jaebeom isn’t satisfied, and he wants to make that clear.

“Listen,” he walks away to turn off the studio track. Silence echoes in the neat space between them. Professional, but singed at the edges. 

Jaebeom pushes. “You sang this song, so imagine that you’re really playing the role of this man. You want to fill in the missing space of that person’s life. You want them to feel you from how you move on stage alone.” 

Jinyoung tilts his head, noncommittal, barely considering it. “I see.” 

Jaebeom closes his eyes and starts up the beat in his head again. There’s the ghost of hands on his hips, a nice nameless face whispering into his ear, and he can feel himself rock against that firm body on a different rhythm.

“Maybe pretend it’s someone. A partner, it doesn’t matter if you’ve dated or not. Imagine how you would want to move against them.” _Someone who can handle you well_ \- The invisible hands circle his waist, then lower, and he follows, lost to the memory. 

When he finishes, (and the dance is just a mess of torso and legs at this point) Jinyoung is staring at him. Unblinking, those dark eyes in the silence grow a little darker. Hooded, something flickering. 

Jaebeom crosses his arms, shaking out his calves a little. “Try it.” 

Jinyoung starts on his count, and this time, it’s almost entirely different. He looks at Jaebeom in the mirror, and Jaebeom wonders - who is it that makes his eyes turn like this, his body grind into the very space of a lover. 

It’s intense. He thinks he can feel it aching in his thighs. 

Jinyoung pauses to catch his breath. He pushes his hair back, and suddenly it’s different. A brusque bent to his arm, frustration but not quite. As if the person called Park Jinyoung, someone who doesn't exist with perpetually styled hair, someone who gets annoyed with the impracticality of singing a love song to an empty mic stand, is finally skimming the surface. 

Well, that and it’s also 3 am. Witching hour. Jaebeom really didn’t mean to push this hard. 

He turns to the iPad, ending the practice session. “So, do you feel it now?”

His back is still turned as he fiddles with the video. Jinyoung’s even voice suddenly comes from behind his shoulder. 

Jaebeom jumps. It’s 3 in the morning, and Jinyoung moves like a goddamn serial killer. The corner of Jinyoung’s lip pulls into a smirk. It’s odd, Jaebeom thinks he wears it so comfortably for someone with such a pretty face. 

“I think so.” 

_your eyes on me_

It’s not that Jaebeom makes it a point to catch Jinyoung’s stages when they air. 

He doesn’t think much about the artists he’s worked with after they release their song, perform, go on tour, etc. Just a formality - there’s no time to watch every stage, and practically, he doesn’t care much when the final sessions are done, where they say goodbyes with respective bows. 

If the manager sends a nice thank you email - cards or flowers reserved for the truly thoughtful ones - Jaebeom counts it as done. No more critiques or little nudges of the foot, he’s satisfied to hear the song on the radio and catch snatches of the dance behind closed eyes. 

Strange then that his manager sends his usual cheery greeting text with a request that Jaebeom tune in for some of Jinyoung’s scheduled stages. 

_I think it would really cheer him on if you did ^ヮ^) thank you in advance JB-ssi!_

Despite everything, Jaebeom laughs a little at the message. He types a short response back after a moment of deliberation.

_i’ll try my best._

Another second, and he tacks on a sticker of a bunny, hopping into the air with a tiny “fighting” above its ears. 

So, Friday afternoon with only a few spare appointments, he takes off early, curls up with Nora on his lap and flicks over to KBS for their 5 pm music show. 

As one of the newer soloists, Jinyoung is scheduled early, and Jaebeom sits through a few sugar-pop summer songs and synth-heavy dance tracks before Jinyoung’s stage comes on. 

He’d been playing with Nora’s paws, more distracted than not, but the tentative hum of guitar mixed with a smooth bass pulls his attention to the screen. 

And then - he can’t look away. 

What had he told Jinyoung before? _I just want you to feel it a little more._

Well. It seems like he’s certainly taken that to heart. His body, his eyes, his voice, it’s like every part of him is performing with the intent to _feel_ deeper. 

_“You’re the only one I need, my only light in this one world. Knowing that you were so beautiful, I should’ve held on with no regrets.”_

In retrospect, Jaebeom wonders if Jinyoung needed him at all. His shoulder snaps forward, guided by his hip in a way that belies effortless control. It’s better than anything he did during practice. He even follows through to his fingertips, beckoning eagerly, longingly. 

Jaebeom doesn’t understand. He’s now quite practically, perfect. 

Jinyoung stares into the camera now with practiced eye-contact. The look is beautiful and intense, the same look Jaebeom had pushed him into during that frustrating 3 am morning session. 

_"Knowing that you were mine, I stay - stuck on you. Stuck on you._ ” 

Jinyoung finishes his stage, and Jaebeom shivers at the way his gaze reaches through the screen. 

...

By the end of his 2.5 week-long promotion, Jaebeom has managed to watch almost all of Jinyoung’s live stages, save for the few he missed for his haphazard work schedule. 

Even when he’s had to duck out in the middle of a performance for a call, he always catches the ending. 

The ending with Jinyoung simply propping the mic stand in one hand, letting it fall against his fingers with the last fading sighs of the song. Casually, there’s a sideways lean of his shoulder against the tilt of his hips in pleated trousers, the cinched halter at his waist. 

His eyes are always left wanting.

At the end of Jinyoung’s goodbye stage, Jaebeom minces his powdered coffee in his mouth in the staff room and feels Jinyoung’s eyes intensely on him. 

_venus in the blindspot_

So maybe Jaebeom looks Jinyoung up a few times in his breaks between hip-hop and idol group choreography. Sue him, he’s already watched the guy’s comeback stages, he’s allowed to do a little bit of Naver research. 

Stage name: Jinyoung. Officially born, Park Jinyoung on 9.22.1994. Same name as the company CEO. 

He’s surprised to find that he debuted first in a duo with _Jackson_ of all people. JY-JK had a single comeback with hairstyles straight out of an early 2000s pop-punk magazine and a title song that can’t seem to stick to one genre. 

It’s the worst kind of earworm that Jaebeom finds himself muttering its lyrics under his breath as he clicks through blurry vlogs that seem to be part of a series for when they were still a duo. 

Jinyoung is absolutely _tiny_ with his razor short coconut cut. Jackson is just as small, but he’s got that blunt, spitfire enthusiasm Jaebeom recognizes when he watches a bleach-blonde Jackson drag Jinyoung around to hand out homemade chocolates from a previous video to every one of their stylists. 

This Jinyoung’s ears stick out beneath his haircut, and he flickers between smiling meekly and pushing Jackson around with a teasing glint in his eye. It’s as if he’s not quite sure how he wants to be seen before the cameras yet. 

The Jinyoung Jaebeom had watched for two weeks was a sleek man who knew exactly what his concept was. Sensitive, and erring on the side of demure, he had worn the half-curl styled over his eyes with the loosened tie pinned just beneath collarbones to prove it. 

The Jinyoung he had worked with over a few stilted early morning sessions seemed to be a fluke. He’s nothing if not pure professionalism on stage. 

Still, the tiny smiling Jinyoung in those low-quality videos is undeniably the same as the one with even shoulders and a trim waist, angled so handsomely into the 4K cameras now. He’s got those deep eye-wrinkles, the little tilt to his lip that makes each smile start off as a smirk - 

And Jaebeom is definitely going beyond clinical curiosity when he’s started watching compilations of “wang gae park gae moments” after their debut and eventual split. 

He exits the video quickly and out of some nudging feeling, clears his watch history. 

Park Jinyoung is just another idol he worked with. He learned the dance well and performed even better on stage. Maybe he had let his image slip a little, but that’s all there is to it. Jaebeom has personally done worse at 3 am on his own, laying on the floor with his shirt rucked up to his collarbones in sweaty exhaustion. 

Jaebeom makes a note to tease Jackson about his choppy debut haircut the next time they meet up and cleanly files Jinyoung away under another completed choreography.

Resolved, he thinks that’s the last time Park Jinyoung is going to be on his mind. 

-

So, maybe not the last time. 

“Oh, hyung!” Jackson waves, a cup of company coffee in hand, fresh from the salon. It’s not uncommon for Jaebeom to be greeted by the sight of him in the mornings with a dewy smile, impossibly awake and cheerful.

Next to him is Jinyoung, half-turned expectantly from their conversation. He wears the same elegant style to his hair, curled just so from his eyes. 

In his hands is a small bouquet. The kind wrapped up in a neat little stand with ribbon and pastel paper all around it. Jaebeom recognizes it from first-place winners, who accept the flowers with a kind of daze before the cameras and confetti.

Jinyoung smiles at him and there is none of that hesitation. Only an intimacy that has no place being here, between Jaebeom and someone he watched quietly on TV in his own private time. 

“JB-ssi,” Jinyoung steps past Jackson, bowing slightly. The bouquet is for _him_ , Jaebeom realizes, hands coming up awkwardly to cup Jinyoung’s. 

“I wanted to thank you for my first win.” Jinyoung’s smile crinkles the edge of his eyes, exactly the way his younger self looked in all those videos Jaebeom didn’t watch. Surely, he has to know how charming he looks now. “The fans absolutely loved the dance.”

Tucked between busy blue and purple hydrangea bunches is a card. White, clean, crisp with only two words in the center - _thank you_. Jaebeom has no doubt the neat _hangul_ is Jinyoung’s handwriting. 

“You guys already know each other -?” Jackson ducks in, and Jaebeom snaps out of his daze. 

He ignores Jackson’s curious whine. “Ah no, you did well enough on your own,” he mumbles brusquely, fixing his grip around the bouquet neck, but Jinyoung’s quirked smile doesn’t fade. 

His eyes glitter so innocently. “Then I’ll have to thank you again for watching my stages, Jaebeom-ssi.” 

Jaebeom stutters, blushes, and completely flounders. Without even meaning to lie, he’s been caught. Jackson starts fussing, asking if Jaebeom really watched Jinyoung’s stages when hyung never paid attention to any of his own, and Jinyoung tilts his head cutely, his eye-smile growing even more apparent. 

Jaebeom’s pulse is jumping erratically in his throat for whatever reason, maybe for the way the delicate perfume of the flowers is mixing into Jackson’s over-done cologne and the hint of his own aftershave. Maybe for the way his usual morning pause is now filled by Jinyoung waiting before him, pretty and poised with one hand in his fitted slacks.

In the end, he settles for tugging one ear free of his face mask, clearing his throat. “Call me hyung.”

-

As it is, Jaebeom starts to see Jinyoung more often. With or without Jackson, it doesn’t seem to matter. He’ll show up in the reflection of the studio mirrors, slipping in with the bright lights above. Caught in the corner of Jaebeom’s eye as he glances up from the stereo system.

“Oh, new dance hyung?” he’ll say, ducking through the door. Jaebeom never keeps it locked even when he’s in the middle of a session, but Jinyoung manages to find him every time he’s alone. 

An uncanny sense maybe, with those shapely eyes, tilted into a curling stare. Though, Jaebeom never turns him away. 

He’ll let Jinyoung stay, propped against the mirrors or idly walking through the steps of whatever Jaebeom is choreographing at his side. Jaebeom doesn’t understand why he asks to learn random dances, but if Jinyoung asks - and it’s often that he does - Jaebeom will demonstrate. 

Just like their session together weeks ago, Jaebeom unabashedly rolls through the line of his waist, his thighs, and Jinyoung watches him with the same look in his eye. The silent pressure from the practice room in the dead silence of 3 am, a shadow of his eye-contact on live stages.

The same look that makes Jaebeom pause in the way it lingers on his back when he turns to stop the track. Intense but not quite defined. 

Jinyoung will blink and tilt his head, and if he’s wearing his glasses, Jaebeom will forget all about it. “Thanks hyung,” he’ll say lightly, passing by and letting their shoulders brush so that Jaebeom will turn to see him smile. Like some kind of promise to visit soon.

Jaebeom doesn’t understand. They’re friends now, he supposes. When he first met Park Jinyoung, he didn’t expect their relationship to turn into this - running into him during morning coffee at the shitty organic-based cafe and having him duck in on rough practice sessions, uninvited - well, it’s not bad. 

Friends is closer than he thought he’d be to Jinyoung, after having watched him perform for about two weeks straight out of a sense of embarrassed, then inevitable, curiosity. 

Friends. Save for the looks Jinyoung gives him, it’s more than fine. 

-

Jaebeom realizes in another post-midnight confrontation that he might have blind-sided himself to the obvious out of shame. That, and also _Jinyoung_. Well-dressed, pretty, and always so perfect down to the natural curl of his lips. It’s hard to see past that. 

It’s past 2, and his hip hurts down to his knee where he’s been slamming it across the floor in an effort to work out a transition. He calls it momentary quits when the burn doesn’t fade with a few slaps of his palm and heads out to the convenience store instead.

Bad habit, he knows, but nothing’s been able to soothe him like memories of _eomma’s_ yogurt. Even the sugary store-bought ones come close enough to recreate a hint of her hand on his head, the spoon tucked sweetly behind his front teeth. 

He’s already fidgeting with a cup in his mouth as he pulls out his phone to see if he can’t go over that move _one more time_ , when - something small and solid smacks into him. 

The cup goes _splat_ on the ground, but it’s Jinyoung. Jinyoung with a face mask, wearing those thick black frames that make his shapely eyes look bigger, and now, they’re widening further, gazing up at Jaebeom. It’s uncanny, how they seem to run into each other, even at this hour. 

“Ah, it’s you hyung-”

“Jinyoung! I’m so sorry-”

Jinyoung waves him off with another eye-smile. “What for? I made you drop your…” he glances at the viscous puddle seeping into the cracks. 

“-pudding?” he finishes, and even when he’s wrong, it’s cute. If he wasn’t wearing his face mask, Jaebeom would be able to see his teeth peek out against his bottom lip, self-assured yet bashful. The uncanny feeling fades, forgotten in Jaebeom’s daze. 

“Mm, no, yogurt.” He shakes the bag, an assortment of cups jostling into each other. It’s almost 3 in the morning; self-control doesn’t matter if faced with a row of new jelly-fruit flavors. 

He hesitates. “Do you want to try one?” 

Jinyoung slips his face mask off, lashes brushing over his cheek as he readjusts everything. He’s got a shadow of stubble, but it’s a casual look on him. Magazine-fresh intimacy, perfect for that morning shoot. 

Even at 3 am, he runs a hand through his hair and it falls softly across his forehead but not into his eyes. Park Jinyoung, perfect. 

“Why are you buying all this yogurt now, hyung?” Despite his slight smirk, it’s not a no, and he steps closer to peek into the bag. 

“Don’t take the banana one, it’s probably shit.” Jinyoung fixes him with a distinctly judging look, but he avoids it in favor of a stack of peach and strawberry. 

Their bowed heads almost brush together over the bag, and when Jinyoung decides on strawberry, he hovers, not quite leaning against Jaebeom’s shoulder. 

Jaebeom hands him a spoon. Jinyoung smiles quietly, and maybe there’s a flicker of something else as his long fingers catch on Jaebeom’s with the short distance growing shorter between them. 

They eat together anyway, Jaebeom surreptitiously turning the banana label away from Jinyoung and Jinyoung not-leaning on his arm, but close enough for Jaebeom to see the soft puffiness below his eyes. 

Late nights make him seem vulnerable, a little more off-guard in a way that he isn’t styled with the cut edges of his circle lenses and flawless skin in the early morning. 

Jaebeom blinks idly, and he realizes, Jinyoung is staring back at him. Actually, more at his mouth. Jaebeom pops the spoon out, dragging a bit of sweet cream against his lip, and Jinyoung’s eyes flicker back up to his own. 

Intense and unflinching as always, but now with clear interest. The flashing sign of the convenience store tugs from the corner of his eye, but Jaebeom feels like Jinyoung has been in his blind spot all along. 

“You’re making a mess hyung,” Jinyoung hums, wiping the yogurt off with his thumb. He doesn’t bring it to his own mouth, but it’s a close thing when his lips part, sliding unevenly. The inside of his lower lip glistens pink against his white teeth. 

“Ah-,” Jaebeom is careful, so careful as he glances at Jinyoung, the other man’s hand still hovering a breath above his mouth. “You’re a good friend Jinyoungie.” 

Jinyoung makes a satisfied noise, his smile barely flickering under the burning street lamps as he smooths his stained thumb over his pink mouth. He looks at Jaebeom as he has since the day they met, eyes dark and left wanting. 

_surely, you’re my type_

Jaebeom thinks of himself as direct. At the expense of coming off as cold or overly inconsiderate, it’s easier to be blunt to the people around him. It suits him well enough at work because his critiques are taken seriously and with friends, family, they learn to deal. 

Partners are a different case. He hasn’t been looking for anything serious for a while, but even casual flings are about hands on his hips, guiding him to someone else’s motions. He might bluster and jerk away, but he likes it when they know to push a bit further. 

It’s a good night if those hands press in harder and leave him bruises before they let go. 

Jinyoung is perpetually teasing, slipping into Jaebeom’s studio when they should both be working just to catch his attention. It’s elegant fingertips on his shoulder, making Jaebeom crane over to look at him because of their slight height difference.

Somehow, that only draws him more to the sweeping corners of Jinyoung’s eyes. Sly, softly offset by the bit of swelling under them. He’ll leave with the same look, nothing but a baiting promise as he compliments Jaebeom, 

“Ah, hyung is so good.” He steps close enough for Jaebeom to smell something like sharp cologne and flowery lotion from the curve of his cheek. “You’ll have to teach me more - next time.” 

Next time, for him to start up this song-and-dance again. Jaebeom can never draw back as quickly, as easy as Jinyoung does. 

Jinyoung likes to tease, and despite - or really because - of it, Jaebeom teases back.

He’s a mess most mornings, but it’s his job to know how to move. Jinyoung’s eyes catch on his body. He’s not subtle as he rolls an extra beat too slow, and neither is Jinyoung’s stare, plastered from his chest to the deep spread of his thighs. Jaebeom is sure that’s what was in his eyes, that 3 am session when he had told Jinyoung to imagine how it would feel to hold a lover. 

Jinyoung is, was, clearly looking at him. Jaebeom draws it out now, letting the half-hidden interest linger before blinking it all away. He smiles nonchalantly as he makes idle talk a few minutes too early from their usual goodbyes. In the end, he is anything but direct. 

Maybe he wants to push and see how much Jinyoung is willing to push back. 

In the end, Jinyoung pushes into his studio right as Jaebeom is lost in his own feelings to the drag of a slow, sighing backtrack. He startles Jaebeom by asking him out, right then and there, just the way Jaebeom likes. 

Bold, honest, and direct. 

“You’re beautiful,” he states, stepping into Jaebeom’s space, “go out with me?”

No arrogance, not even a smirk - only a searing confidence as he tilts his chin up, knowing that they’ve been doing this back and forth at his will - and now, Jaebeom won’t be the one to say no. 

So, of course, Jaebeom kisses him. No better policy than being direct, right?

_a perfect 10_

Dating Jinyoung, Park Jinyoung, the prim man who wears glasses with thick lenses outside of cameras and a bit of a perpetual smirk, is like trying to understand an enigma. A perfect enigma at that.

Jaebeom wonders where he draws the line between himself and his image on the bright TV screen, on glossy magazine spreads. If that line stops somewhere at the door of Jaebeom’s studio, hazelnut coffee in hand, just the way he likes it. 

And yet.

“Ugh.” Jaebeom curls surreptitiously behind the bare-wood table, cupping his tall espresso as if that could hide him somehow. It’s just the company cafe, furnished with exposed brick walls and low chairs at tables meant for two. Jinyoung shows up in the middle of a slow noon hour and still manages to attract attention among the meandering cafe crowd. 

“What?” Jinyoung prompts, sliding into the seat. Fawn-brown suit jacket, cut to his shoulders, swept back without a single crease. 

Jaebeom sighs, still curled over the table. The piercing noon sun in his eyes and now Jinyoung dressed like the newest spring to summer runway collection makes it hard for him to call this a casual cafe date. Stress on the _casual_.

“I told you,” Jaebeom taps pointedly at the table, two of his rings clinking against the edge of Jinyoung’s bare fingers. “This was supposed to be casual.”

“This is casual.” Jinyoung tilts his head, and of course, no contacts today. Just glasses with silver points on the frame that make him look earnestly wonderful in everything he says. Jaebeom ducks away to avoid the full effect of his stare.

Jinyoung hooks his foot over Jaebeom’s leg instead. White leather dress shoes.

Jaebeom scoffs at the sight of them, shaking through the wisps of his hair he had purposefully tied up. It was as “casually” messy as he could make it, having rolled out of bed an hour or so earlier. “Then what does that make me, huh?” 

Jinyoung props himself up by the palm. Elbow to wrist, angled with a gleaming watch face. He stares at Jaebeom with open eyes, the most serious consideration in his arched brows.

“You’re perfect.”

Jaebeom breath comes out a little shaky, indignant. He feels hot and fuzzy, but also like he might not be able to stop the smile from spreading across his cheeks. 

“You are, you know,” Jinyoung prompts with another of his creased smiles, eyes curling and so handsome behind his glasses, “you’re the kind that looks good in whatever you wear.”

“Shut up, Mr. GQ,” Jaebeom grouses, but he doesn’t really mean it.

He’s perfect and Jaebeom _hates_ him. 

Jinyoung knows it because he only leans across the table as Jaebeom covers half his face with his hoodie sleeve. He waits, patient and adoring, because it’s like he already knows that when push comes to shove, Jaebeom likes to be pushed just a bit further. How he might want to be teased even when he blusters awkwardly.

Those darkly glistening eyes, they seem to know him intimately.

And yet. Jaebeom has no idea what Jinyoung is thinking behind that stare.

_your smile to me is the perfect flash_

Jaebeom chooses their next date because if Jinyoung is going to show up looking the way he does, then he might as well fit in with fellow works of art.

It’s a private art exhibit, and Jaebeom refuses to think of it as pretentious. A private affair where Jinyoung can hook his arm into the crook of Jaebeom’s elbow and leave his bare smile uncovered.

He’s had the invite from weeks past, a friend who paints in acrylic blues and greens that take on the impressions of people in a state of melancholy. Rotting sunflowers and brown creases under folded eyes.

Jaebeom likes it all very much. Jinyoung laughs when he pauses for another five minutes in front of a sickly-looking young man on a grey canvas.

“You don’t like it?” Jaebeom blinks away from his mental contemplation to Jinyoung ducking behind his hand with a carefree brush of his bangs. Amidst the cool static lighting, Jinyoung in his usual browns and creamy whites is an immense flash of soothing color. 

“No, no,” he stutters with deep, steady giggles. He waves Jaebeom’s pout off lightly, self-assured.

Jinyoung tucks his hands back into his pockets, his shoulders almost even with Jaebeom’s under the long tan coat he’s wearing today. His eyes flicker between the portrait of the gloomy youth to Jaebeom as he smiles with a small quirk of his lips.

“You’re very deep is all.” He says it and Jaebeom feels like he’s being mocked. Endearingly so.

“What,” Jaebeom fronts, and he has to lord his scant 3 cm over Jinyoung now with a harder bump of his shoulder. “You don’t think I could be.”

Jinyoung makes some space between them with a gentle push, but his hand remains, fitted to the curve of Jaebeom’s arm. He clutches Jaebeom to him as he turns both of them towards the portrait again.

As an answer, he tilts his chin, gesturing between the painting and each other. “What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?” His eyes stay, a glance from the slight corner, where his fingers sink into the folds of rough denim over Jaebeom’s bicep. They stop at his neck, an uneven frame captured by soft edges, loose hair, and Jinyoung’s own dark eyes.

Oh, deep, Jaebeom wants to mock Jinyoung but he’s holding those words so carefully in his mouth. He quotes like he sings, _like he kisses_ , pursing his pretty lips to the shape of the sound. As if he could taste them if he fit the curve of his tongue close enough to another person’s parted mouth, a stranger’s murmured phrase.

Jaebeom watches the slow spread of his smile, how it shows his teeth, a hint of the soft pink of his mouth, and he has to lean down to kiss Jinyoung behind the flash of his closed eyes. A moment for him to promise to commit to photography later. 

Jinyoung presses back sweeter, teasing and more enigmatic than any of the bold, watching stares framed in the room. Jaebeom wonders if this is how Jinyoung treats all his lovers, a hand gripping him by the crook of his jaw, sinking him into his open mouth, until Jaebeom is left to follow insistently, pleading with a breath still caught on Jinyoung’s lips.

Jinyoung’s eyes seem to say nothing else, _only you_. Jaebeom can’t will himself to push any further after that.

(Jinyoung is not a book with distinct chapters or a film to be paused on each and every still frame. Not even a piece of artwork to hang up beneath filtered lighting and let curious, discerning gazes wander over the intent behind careful brush strokes.

Jaebeom doesn’t mind the enigma that Jinyoung presents because he pauses at his side, and with those black eyes, he’s always looking at Jaebeom). 

_we’re picturesque even ruined in the rain_

Jinyoung is the type of person who wakes up to wear his hair in one style and the rest of the day follows accordingly. Jaebeom is sure of that when nothing seems to faze that one sloped curl above his brow, the rest swept back in a crown that holds itself together without the tacky shine of mystery gel. 

He’s only half-joking when he glances out at the new summer shower and suggests Jinyoung go practice his new choreography in the rain. It’s not made by Jaebeom this time -

(“conflict of interest, hyung,” Jinyoung reasons even as Jaebeom suggests all the things he could do that would surely make his fans happy.

“If you want to see me body-roll, all you’d have to do is ask,” Jinyoung replies simply).

-but Jaebeom has seen it many times, from its initial stages to the private, looser interpretations between the two of them.

The mic stand was the key point last time. Jinyoung’s team suggested an umbrella to recreate the effect, but it’s not quite the same. Not with Jinyoung’s fingers folding into the explicit parody of a prayer as his mouth swayed before the mic.

Still, the hooked grip of the umbrella is charming.

“If hyung wants me to.” 

Jaebeom is beyond joking and only surprised when Jinyoung calmly grips him by the wrist. Standing up, he jerks Jaebeom’s limp arm to him, a stark determination to his cocked hip, his hand on his waist.

Somehow, they forego the umbrella entirely.

Jinyoung’s elegant hair, previously slightly ruffled from laying on the couch, now drips in flat brown streaks across his forehead. Jaebeom gapes at the sight. His own clothes are plastered to his skin, his hair down to his neck, but it’s Jinyoung – Jinyoung completely wet, ruined, and still held together so wonderfully by his glistening edges in the rain.

Jinyoung tugs him in, fingers making sopping imprints through his shirt, and when they move, it is nothing close to the choreography of his new song. Jaebeom can feel the ridges of Jinyoung’s warm hip beneath his hands, beneath his expensive knit blouse. He’s hot in a shower of cold rain that chills to the bone.

Touching each other feels stilted, entirely uncomfortable in the way of numb joints and stiff folds caught on skin, but the rain crystallizes in perfect droplets at the dip of Jinyoung’s neck. He looks up at Jaebeom, his eyes so wet he could be crying. Beneath the frigid sheen of water covering them both, it burns to be this close. 

Jaebeom’s thumb parts the seam of glistening, swollen lips. Jinyoung’s choked gasp is drowned into the tumble of gravel when Jaebeom’s leg nudges into the hard, soaked space between his legs.

“Would you let me-”

Jinyoung interrupts him with rough fingers in his hair, smearing thin lines back from his face, his forehead. His next breath shudders visibly in the air, raindrops spluttering from his mouth.

“Anything.” He holds Jaebeom in place, cradling him with cold hands that have no intention of giving way.

“I did this for you, didn’t I,” he snorts, leaning in so that Jaebeom can feel the wetness trail between their noses, the barest parting of their mouths.

 _For me._ Jaebeom is turning it over in his mind when he hauls a dripping Jinyoung back onto his bed. He leaves a huge wet spot, a shape in the most flawless incrimination, and Jaebeom adds to its edges as he crawls on top Jinyoung. He kisses him, burying him into the humid warmth of the bed. The rain flicks in through the slotted window, deafening the sounds of their lips, sliding past one another with muffled gasps. 

Jinyoung yanks him down further, clawed fingers, slick mouth, glistening eyes. 

Jaebeom still can’t believe it, with his hands around Jinyoung’s waist, his stomach knocking into Jinyoung’s pert ass. He can’t believe it when Jinyoung looks back at him on his hands and knees, everything out of place. From his tangled hair to his shaking, pleading eyes as Jaebeom pushes him down, he’s knocking those neat little mannerisms into messy, choked breaths. 

He bites into his bottom lip with a deep cry as Jaebeom’s thrust pushes him into the headboard.

He looks up, filled with only hazy satisfaction as Jaebeom jerks his cock over the tight lines of his clenched stomach, rucking his shirt to his collarbones desperately.

He’s a complete mess. Jaebeom touches the softly swollen edge of his hole, still slick with come. Jinyoung lets him, trailing the path of rain-water, his own milky sweat into his skin.

 _For me._ Jinyoung is ruined with parted, panting sighs, his trousers dragged over one bent leg, and Jaebeom between his spread thighs. Even then, the grey light of the storm outside is quiet, picturesque on the plane of his flushed face. 

_For me_. Jaebeom was allowed to mess up his neat hair, clean lips, the clothes pressed to fit his body, and Jinyoung only looks at him with those dark, intense eyes, telling him _more_ , _everything_. 

“Oh my god—,” Jaebeom groans, fumbling with shaky legs to press a kiss to Jinyoung’s curled smile.

Jinyoung turns into it, slotting the angles of their faces perfectly together. He holds Jaebeom’s cheek to him with steady hands. “I know.” 

_you’re my perfect 10_

Jaebeom knows that they’re being obnoxious. That even though Jinyoung doesn’t have the strictest dating clause in his contract, they should be careful. Reserved at least for the public eye.

“Morning,” Jinyoung greets, and Jaebeom pretends like it’s the first time this week they’re seeing each other. He leans into the mouth on his cheek and there’s the slight stickiness of cherry lip-tint smearing past.

“You guys are gross,” Jackson mumbles, bumping into Jinyoung from behind. He’s got his hair styled, in tandem to Jinyoung as always, and today, big chunky sunglasses cover half his face indoors.

Jinyoung brushes away first, a smile settling nicely on his cheeks this morning. He’s still wearing his round glasses over his foundation, and Jaebeom, irrationally, hopes he’ll keep them on for the rest of the day.

Jinyoung waves, collected, prim and proper again, and Jaebeom, dazed, returns it a beat too late. Jackson gazes between the two of them through the empty sphere of his black bug eyes. 

“I’ve never seen Jinyoungie like this,” he speaks up in the odd silence that follows. Jaebeom still leaned against the empty receptionist desk, Jackson watching him stare after the space where Jinyoung was.

“Hm?” Jaebeom blinks. His own gaping reflection stares back from Jackson’s round glasses.

“He was always so closed off during training.” Jackson pouts with those ridiculous bug-eyes. “Even after JY-JK split up, we barely got close enough for me to still keep contacting him.”

He slides the sunglasses off, shaking his hair into place with a little frown. Seeing his eyes, Jaebeom worries at how genuinely downtrodden he seems to be.

“Jinyoung likes his privacy,” he offers with a half-smile of understanding.

“Yeah, but-,” Jackson huffs, bunching himself up like he might stomp his foot or something equally childish. Such an idol, Jaebeom thinks fondly. “He’s not private at all when it comes to you.”

 _Whatever that means_ , Jaebeom isn’t sure, but he pushes away the nudging feeling that says he might. Instead, he pinches Jackson’s cheek and when the younger man protests, he points him towards the stairs in the early hours of morning.

He can’t shake the feeling though. He takes off his jacket and fiddles with it in his hands, swaying slightly in the middle of the empty dance studio.

Jinyoung sighing and relaxing next to Jaebeom as a cheap horror movie was playing through its credits. Jinyoung letting Jaebeom lay an arm around him in the exact opposite way that Park Jinyoung needed to be untouchable in public. 

Jinyoung looking up at him sharply when the lines of their hips bumped where Jaebeom’s shirt had ridden up. An accident of sleepy intimacy. He had been unreadable in that moment, his face completely dark save for the TV light slanting over his cheek. 

“Hyung.” Jaebeom was frozen with Jinyoung turned in his hold. 

“I’ll take the couch tonight.” His smile had flickered, the corner of it peeking into the static white glare.

Jaebeom slowly ties the jacket around his waist now, recalling the way he had held his breath as he had wriggled beneath his covers. The cats had crawled onto his pillow at some point, but it was him alone in bed and Jinyoung in the next room over.

He had been unable to sleep for some time with that odd breath lodged in his chest.

As Jaebeom slips into a warm-up with the beat pounding into the studio floor, he thinks Jackson is wrong about Jinyoung. About him and Jinyoung.

Even with him fucked open beneath Jaebeom, wet from the rain and his own flushed heat, there’s a part of him that remains so unattainable. It’s in his eyes, sometimes when he catches Jaebeom staring, other times just watching him directly. Always indecipherable, indescribably intense in his want.

\- 

It’s never explicit between them, but Jaebeom doesn’t ever visit Jinyoung’s sequestered apartment, four floors above the cleanest view of the Han River.

Instead, Jinyoung has a copy of his key, and that’s the closest he comes to asking Jinyoung to move in.

Some nights Jinyoung doesn’t use it, and it’s silent save for the stilted background beats of hip-hop and Odd’s occasional cries for attention. When he does, Jaebeom always waits for the pause after the first easy click where Jinyoung fiddles with the tricky second lock. 

The key is supposed to work for both, but Jinyoung has never been able to figure out the second lock. Pressing in and turning hard to the left only gets him so far before he blames it on Jaebeom brute-forcing it open too many times in the past.

He doesn’t bother with it much anymore since Jaebeom is always there, waiting on the other side.

Jaebeom jerks up from the couch to open it for him now. 

“Jinyoungie,” he breathes out, unabashedly eager at the prospect of Jinyoung staying the night.

“Hi hyung.” Jinyoung grips the strap of his cross-body bag, and it’s one of those days. There are whiskers curling from his eyes, but tensed, as if he had struggled to keep them creased like that for hours on end.

He ducks around Jaebeom, all loose lines and poise until he flops onto the couch. Then, he’s messing up his curled hair as he runs hard fingers past his eyes, his brows, smearing pale foundation with the pull of his cheek. Jaebeom shuts the door gingerly and follows.

Jinyoung doesn’t come over often when he’s like this. Jaebeom is never sure what to do either with his moods. Usually, Jinyoung will head out again before the night is over, patting Jaebeom’s face carefully before he turns the breadth of his small, tight shoulders to the door. 

Today, Jaebeom settles for touching a finger to the corner of his clenched eyes. The delicate skin there jumps, a nervous flicker, but he doesn’t say anything. Jaebeom can’t see his expression much beneath the shadow of his arm, only the calm perk of his lips.

It’s too often though that Jaebeom can’t read him even when he can see Jinyoung’s eyes. Dark yet clear as they always turn to find him. 

“Jinyoung,” he starts slowly, rubbing his thumb over those thin folds. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Jaebeom keeps it up for a few more tentative, soothing moments before Jinyoung breaths out, harsh and quick. His hand suddenly grips Jaebeom’s, wrapping around his wrist to dig four fingers into his pulse-point.

“I-“ Jinyoung cuts himself off. He keeps Jaebeom there, tensed above his face, his eyes still hidden under his arm.

“I – Jaebeom,” he stops again, short and frustrated. The muscle in his cheek jumps, just the way it does when he’s smiling large and uneven. This time, he’s clearly holding back.

Jaebeom carefully, so carefully lowers his arm with Jinyoung’s own. Then, he leans over softly and kisses him.

Jinyoung doesn’t give in to the kiss, but Jaebeom presses earnestly against him. A hum, the lightest swipe of his tongue, their shared breath brushing over Jinyoung’s top lip. His forehead bumps into Jinyoung’s arm, but he hopes Jinyoung knows – Jaebeom doesn’t mind, how tightly he keeps his eyes locked behind his wrist. 

Even if Jinyoung doesn’t say anything, as long as he’s willing to come back to Jaebeom at the end of the day and let himself be opened up, small and slight, like this, it’s enough. 

Jinyoung’s arm drops, and he’s staring at Jaebeom. Piercing, raw, and wanting as he pulls him down into his lap.

“Jaebeom, can I—” Despite his shaking tone, his fingers clench around Jaebeom’s waist as if he might never be able to let go again.

“Anything,” Jaebeom breathes, crowding into Jinyoung’s space, his mouth, asking for those hands to hold on tighter, as tight and harsh as he needs.

This time it’s Jaebeom cradling Jinyoung to him with short fingers, turning Jinyoung so their noses don’t bump, so he can lick sloppily into his mouth until their teeth click. It’s too dry, the friction, hissing breaths, fumbling with tacky spit and pre-cum as Jinyoung fucks up into him.

It’s Jinyoung toppling them over onto the couch until Jaebeom’s gasps are punched out of him with every dragging thrust.

Jinyoung keeps one hand gripped around his waist, overlapping with his hipbone. A thumb digs into the line of his stomach, and Jaebeom makes a high sound that gets lost in the gurgle of his throat.

Jinyoung pauses, but his hard grip remains. Tight to the point of bruising. “You like that?” he asks with those dark, dark eyes spilling over as he holds Jaebeom still on his cock.

This isn’t a tease, a dallying back-and-forth about coffee and stolen shirts. Jinyoung holds him like he wants to tear Jaebeom apart and Jaebeom is entirely willing.

He nods jerkily, covering his shuddering exhale with his knuckles. Jinyoung’s eyes glisten, sharpening at the corners, until his usual sloping stare almost seems cruel.

He re-adjusts his hold, slipping out slightly to Jaebeom’s choked cry. His fingers are loose now, barely enough for Jaebeom to feel them tickling over his waist.

“Do you want it?”

Another silent nod, but as Jaebeom blinks through a haze, he knows it won’t be enough.

Jinyoung tears his hand away from his mouth. Jaebeom’s wrist goes numb under Jinyoung’s palm, the weight of it pushing him into the curve of the armrest. Jinyoung’s lips part until it’s his white teeth hissing over Jaebeom, close enough to bite –

“Then, beg for me.”

Jaebeom opens his mouth, shaking as Jinyoung brushes against him in the imitation of a kiss, and he begs.

" _Please_ Jinyoung,”

Jinyoung thrusts back in with one smooth, solid movement, digging Jaebeom’s head awkwardly into the crook of the armrest.

“Harder, harder, more— I need,”

Jinyoung’s hand finally fits around his waist again, forcing bruises and the impression of something deeper, aching into the sharp points beneath his fingers. Jaebeom’s stomach jumps every time Jinyoung drags his cock out, leaving him empty, only to press down with his thumb on that pulsing space.

It hurts, but Jaebeom loses himself to that feeling of being filled, of wanting more even when it’s tears leaking from his eyes to wet behind his ears. 

“Anything, Jinyoung, you can do anything to me, I don’t care – just, you’re everything,”

Jinyoung comes with an open-mouthed flush, the most vulnerable sound Jaebeom has ever heard from his pink, trembling lips. He wrings himself dry inside of Jaebeom, and it’s that feeling, of Jinyoung spilling over in a hot wave that pulses down into his thighs that makes his own eyes roll back.

He comes, one hand held limply against the cushions, stomach shifting to the shape of Jinyoung’s bruising fingers. 

…

“Wow,” he finally breathes out after some time, hoarse with a bit of an accidental cough. “You fuck good.”

Jinyoung laughs into his chest. He doesn’t raise his head, choosing to toy blindly with the chain at Jaebeom’s collarbone instead. One hand remains curled lightly around his hip.

Jaebeom nudges him softly with trailing fingertips. His legs are still numb, and Jinyoung is a slight man, but right now, laid over Jaebeom, he’s warm muscle and heavy, weighted breaths.

Jinyoung turns his chin easily into Jaebeom’s hold. His eyes are all gentle now, the natural little whiskers setting in on the haze of satisfaction. Jaebeom remembers the hard line in Jinyoung’s jaw, the way he had hid his eyes before, and maybe he understands what this is about. 

“I know I say it a lot, but,” Jaebeom adjusts his fingers so he can cradle Jinyoung from his chin to the crook of his jaw. He scratches him in that spot behind his ears, and like his many cats, Jinyoung preens with a curl of his lips.

“You’re perfect.”

Jinyoung’s expression flickers, parting his mouth, slightly lost in the center of Jaebeom’s palm. Jaebeom leans down to meet him with a kiss, gentle, despite the words exchanged before between teeth and gasps.

He draws back, pulling Jinyoung to him. “I mean it. Even when you don’t have to be, and even when you’re not, you’re so – god, it’s _fucking_ crazy.”

 _It’s like you know me._ Jaebeom looks into his eyes, trying to understand even though he never will. He hopes Jinyoung can see what he’s trying to say instead.

There’s something on Jinyoung’s face, something curling between tentative expressions. In the end, it settles on the sweet smile he wore when he gave Jaebeom his first-place bouquet. The creases at his eyes don’t seem to hurt anymore. 

“I try.” _Perfect_. “For you.”

The next day, Jaebeom checks his hip beneath the waistband of his sweatpants, and there are bruises from where Jinyoung finally let go in the bare hours of morning. It was a good night, he thinks smugly, letting his pants snap back into place with an aching twinge.

_if you like this_

_it's yours, it's yours_

Jaebeom falls deeper than he ever should, but Jinyoung is unlike anyone he’s met.

He gets Jaebeom to do things, say things, open himself up in ways that aren’t like him at all. And yet – Jaebeom would. For Jinyoung, nothing feels too wrong, too shameful, if it’s those intense eyes on him, waiting for more.

Jinyoung tells Jaebeom all these things like he knows him, knows how much he’s willing to do it. For him and him only. 

Lurid, with his bare knees propped against his burning cheek in the dark, the flash of the laptop camera makes it clear how hard he is beneath his thin t-shirt. The cats bat indignantly at the door, shut out for the night.

“Jaebeom.” Jinyoung’s voice rings out, tinny through the overseas connection and the haze in Jaebeom’s ears.

“Spread.”

When did they drop the _hyung_ between them, Jaebeom wonders as he parts his thighs. His cock aches and he’s shaking a little, but the cute quirk in Jinyoung’s lip settles the reluctant shivers into something deeper at the base of his empty stomach. 

Somewhere between Jinyoung pulling him off his cock to come over his face, into his open mouth, and Jaebeom needing the fresh press of fingers over yesterday’s splotchy green bruise – formalities of a kind are lost. 

He supposes Jinyoung gets off on it too. He had paused then, holding Jaebeom still by the jaw to watch him breath through the smeared come on his lips with calm, blank eyes. Now, in the phone camera with only the corner of his stare, he does the same thing six hours ahead in the studio lights of his dressing room.

“Touch yourself.”

Spread bare in the dark, Jaebeom doesn’t care how embarrassing it is. Or rather he’s not like this, he doesn’t like the hot pink flush of shame but — he wants Jinyoung to see anyway.

Jinyoung watches, humming his movie OST as a low timber to cover the erratic pitch of Jaebeom’s moans.

“Jinyoung – ah, I’m-“ Jaebeom’s fingers slip over his cock, wet but the friction hurts as if he were dry, empty. If Jinyoung were here, if it were his smooth fingers instead–

Jinyoung stops humming, his pretty falsetto turning into the curling syllables of patient words instead.

“You can do more than that Jaebeom-ah. Use your fingers.”

Jaebeom tugs his dick back with one hand, slipping two fingers in dry with the other. He gasps through the spit in his mouth, and it only takes Jinyoung’s lidded stare dropping down to the lurid flush between his legs before he clenches down _hard_.

He comes and bites into his tongue, deep enough to draw blood in the process. Maybe they’re taking this too far, but Jinyoung makes him open his mouth to the camera, the clinical white screen, and Jaebeom does so, lolling his tongue out entirely.

Whatever this is, it feels more than good to have Jinyoung’s gaze fixed on him like this, obsessively. A thrill beneath the early morning kisses and Jinyoung napping with skewed glasses under his arm.

Jaebeom laughs shakily when Jinyoung’s eyes wrinkle unevenly. His voice fills Jaebeom’s trembling insides, warm water to a pitcher, as he tells him to get that cleaned up.

So he likes it when Jinyoung’s meaner, and Jinyoung gets hard when he humiliates Jaebeom a little.

It’s good. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than this.

_i did this, and everything else, for you_

“Jaebeom.”

A hard knock sounds at the door, muffling Jinyoung’s steady voice. Odd, Jaebeom blinks up from his phone. He had been waiting for the first click of the key.

The cats clamor towards the familiar sound, and Jaebeom fondly thinks that they’re all used to Jinyoung now. Jaebeom hauls Nora up and goes to open the door with her yowling in the crook of his elbow. Two clicks, a slight push, and pull.

He unceremoniously drops her out of surprise. She twists, sprawls, and lands with a disgruntled rumble. The other cats crowd at the steps, turning their glassy pupils up at Jinyoung and Jaebeom’s legs.

“Hyung.” Jinyoung is carrying someone, a man almost slipping from his tight shoulders. His eyes flicker down to the tiny surging litter.

“Can you get the cats into the bedroom?”

Jaebeom laughs, a little off-put. He grabs Nora again, settling her against his chest despite the pinprick protests of her claws. “It’s not that easy to fit five cats in at once Jinyoungie.” 

Jinyoung meets his trailing laughter with odd silence, simply stepping in with the man, dragged limply by one arm. Jaebeom hesitates, tucking Nora tighter to him for a moment. The look in Jinyoung’s eyes is calm, dark water in the rain waiting for Jaebeom to make a ripple. Waiting for Jaebeom to listen. 

Jaebeom herds the other four cats between his awkward steps towards the hallway.

He’s almost there, dropping Nora with a stunted hop onto the carpet, when he hears the hard crack of something hitting the kitchen tile. Odd protests plaintively, but he’s already closing the door on the poor Turkish Angora as he hurries towards the sound.

Beneath the clean afternoon light through the kitchen filter, Jinyoung holds Jaebeom’s microwave at chest-level above the blood and pulp of the man’s crushed face.

Jaebeom forces back the raw sound in his throat with an aborted scream, but Jinyoung has already seen him.

He turns, and it’s slow, a graceful blink, not a speck of anything on his cheeks. Jaebeom falters for the table’s edge, but his legs, his body, everything gives out all at once, and he hits the floor on his knees with a _whoosh_ of breath.

Up-close, Jaebeom’s dazed eyes catch on the three rings of the man’s splayed left hand. Two silver, one gold, seemingly tacky whenever they tapped against thick schedules.

“Jinyoung,” he starts, his voice reaching as if in a distant fog but ending somewhere high and thick in his head, “is that – is that your _manager_?”

He says it, and he knows, he knows that’s it. Suddenly, he wants to scream and scrabble away on the hard tile edges because that’s a dead body leaking brain fragments into _eomma_ ’s pink housewarming rug, and Jinyoung is here because – because

Jinyoung crouches slowly, brown slacks shifting with tight creases over his hip. Jaebeom shakes in place as Jinyoung’s hand comes up to cup his face. Jinyoung’s own cheeks are still clean, lotion-soft with the slightest smile. But his palm is wet.

Jaebeom shudders, jerking away, the cool blood on his burning skin. Jinyoung doesn’t let go, so Jaebeom pushes, pushes and rips his fingers into Jinyoung’s creamy blouse, until they’re toppling together with a cut breath onto the floor.

Jinyoung’s freshly dyed brown hair pillows out, spread looser than usual against hard tile. He looks up at Jaebeom with parted lips, dark eyes, as if he might be flustered in the aftermath of a kiss. 

“Why,” Jaebeom chokes out, ripping the word from his throat, the only thing he can think of as he digs into the tender give of Jinyoung’s shoulders. “Why, Jinyoung—”

Jinyoung’s hand comes up again to cradle his cheek. Stained from his fingers to his wrist, the slick bits of gore slide down his arm to pool against his white sleeve. A finger traces the corner of his eye adoringly, and the feeling of it _stings._

Jinyoung gazes up at Jaebeom with everything. “He told me to stop seeing you.”

Jaebeom doesn’t know if he’s breathing as he pushes at Jinyoung again, jolting him limply into the floor.

Jinyoung’s eyes don’t falter beneath the messy strands tangled with sweat and now, dark red splatter. “I couldn’t.”

Jaebeom gasps, taking in air desperately through his wet mouth. The microwave is still there, to the side of the man’s sunken stomach, soaked in a pool of blood. He imagines, right where Jinyoung is now and with Jaebeom sat on top of him, legs raised on both sides of his hips – that’s how he would’ve done it.

Jaebeom throws himself off of Jinyoung, knocking the smaller man into the cabinets violently. Jaebeom collapses onto his elbows, coughing through a lack of air, the blur of sweat, tears, and something uncontrollable and acrid coming so close to the top of his throat.

Jinyoung scrabbles to pull him back again, and this time, he holds Jaebeom still by his slick, heaving cheeks. 

“You’re the only one I need.” For once, he looks truly desperate. Having hit his head on the cabinets, a small red imprint cuts across his left brow, almost bleeding into his wide, shaking eyes.

Jaebeom struggles, “—my god, oh my god - you can’t be serious,” but Jinyoung only turns him away from the mess of gore streaked across the kitchen tiles with steady hands.

“My only light in this one world.” Jinyoung stares at him and suddenly he shifts with a blink. The panic settles into gentle, deep, dark doe-eyes. He is beyond serious. 

Jaebeom shakes and then sinks helplessly into his palms. “Are you really quoting your own lyrics at me right now?”

Jinyoung cocks his head, and it’s such a smooth action. Deliberately – or is it deliriously – charming. “Yes?”

Jaebeom finally manages to yank himself free then. He stumbles back, socks soaking into the cold tile as the fresh bruises on his knees bloom violently through the pins and needles. “You’re going to, to quote a love song for your fangirls when you _killed_ someone, okay – that’s, _fuck-_ ”

What does it is Jinyoung’s soft eyes following him. Seeing only him.

“Didn’t you say anything. Everything?” Jinyoung cranes his neck, wrist twitching limply towards Jaebeom.

Odd meows, despondent, from behind a closed door, and before Jinyoung can say anything else, Jaebeom flops over and throws up into the dead man’s gaping head cavity. The world spins, blurring the ceiling with the smeared tile, but it’s the sickly yellow film of Jinyoung’s face that meets Jaebeom’s fluttering eyes.

(He hallucinates the distinct sensation of grabbing onto Jinyoung and falling with him)

-

In the morning, the body, the blood is gone, but Jaebeom rubs his eyes again and again, until sticky tears are leaking over his knuckles and he’s trying to breathe through his escalating gasps.

Because so is the microwave.

So is Jinyoung.

_don’t say it was my mistake_

Jackson calls first. Ten times, and an innumerous amount of voicemails and spamming texts later, does the phone settle on Jaebeom’s bedside table.

Then, just one call, one text makes him break down again.

 _Jaebeom, we should talk_.

Jaebeom blocks the number immediately and then, chucks the phone towards the living room couch cushions. He wishes he had deleted it, but he can’t go out beyond the boundary of his bedroom, can’t pass by the empty shadow of the kitchen.

His cats swarm the door when he yanks it shut, but Jaebeom can’t let them in either. The feeling of another body bearing over his own – it’s giving him night terrors.

Worse, even worse, he doesn’t want to admit, but he dreams of the way Jinyoung gazed at him, darkly patient, a flickering stare across so many moments of intimacy. They’re almost memories until he hears his own voice ask distantly, plead so desperately:

“ _anything, jinyoung."_

 _Anything_ , and Jinyoung smiles, a smooth spread from his lips to his eyes. Jaebeom wakes the next moment choking from the hands cuffed around his throat, fingers digging grooves into his hip. His sweatpants stick to his thighs, and he muffles his cries into his palms until he can’t breathe.

Until he’s no longer hard at the idea of Jinyoung willingly hurting him again.

-

Jaebeom goes back to work after a week. A week spent in a violent haze, flashes of movement that are just his cats streaking past his legs. Colors playing out beneath his eyelids that force him to ask if anything really happened between dreaming, sleeping, and waking. 

The deepest blue of bruises, orange-yellow flicker of kitchen lights. Brown stains festering in tile corners that disappear a moment later. The shock of red that could never fade over wide, beseeching, black eyes.

Jaebeom changes his schedule drastically. Weekends and early afternoons only. Management takes it as the lasting effects of a bad fever with only a few complaints and adjustments.

Jaebeom certainly acts and looks the part of someone barely recovered. It’s better now to hide the glint of his own eyes in the mirrors with a low cap, the tucked edge of a face-mask.

When he catches sight of himself, it’s by habit, by accident. Running water, a moment to smooth back his hair, check the spot above his brow. But by then, it’s too late. The shadows under his lashes are like stains, ink growing so permanent it’s malignant.

The look on his face is not himself. Haunted, shaken, empty. As if he’s still waiting for someone to reach out to him, reassure him somehow that this didn’t all start because of Jaebeom pushing Jinyoung too far into his own interest.

His eyes are still a shock of dazed panic, frozen from that night.

(Jinyoung hasn’t tried to contact him since)

Jaebeom locks his studio now, leaving it immediately to go sit somewhere more public in between sessions. He doesn’t ever idle alone with slow, cool-down beats at the end of the day, waiting with a laxness sliding over his body for the door to click open.

He takes the 7 pm work-rush line, filled with an indistinct murmur of a crowd, until it’s just him alone clutching his keys in front of his two locks.

Jaebeom has thought about changing his locks too many times. But it’s the slight catch of the second one, the one that he twists now with a slight pain in his left wrist, that he desperately holds onto.

-

Jaebeom has to use his kitchen eventually – if not for his stomach threatening collapse after weeks of takeout, then for his cats, who deserve more than packaged kibble dug out from the storage closet.

Odd yanks at his pant leg now, bright blue pupils wide at the smell of canned tuna just above. Jaebeom holds the dish edge tight, trying to concentrate on the simple movement of his chopsticks through stringy, pale chunks of meat.

Another prolonged mewl, this time punctured with tiny pricks of claws. Her tail lashes out in a shock of white, and Jaebeom’s fingers lock into place.

The deckled edges shatter with a harsh scream against the ground. Falling bits of tuna mix with the dust of cut porcelain, and the sound, the sound of a wet crash echoes –

Jaebeom pushes Odd away from licking at the spilled juices, and when she yowls stubbornly, he yanks her up and practically throws her past the door.

He tries to clean up the broken pieces, but his hands slip so much when there’s the pink meat, his knees shaking, pressing bruises into the tile again despite it being weeks now, and he’s _soaking wet_ –

Jaebeom collapses back against the cabinets, catching the choked-off aftermath of his own gasps. The blood is not – it’s not real.

His fingers though, they’re stinging with small cuts from his knuckles to the ripped cuticles. Mixed with the soggy tuna, it’s easy to see how a minuscule bit of red could spread across the entire floor, washing it pink. Fingertips always bleed the most, he recalls _eomma_ telling him as she wrapped his pinky up, tiny and shaking, after a slip of the kitchen knife. The tiniest bunch of nerve endings, yet even a papercut hurts for days on end.

The kitchen floor is clean of any gore, save for a shattered plate, but for the first time, Jaebeom confronts the stinging, insignificant wounds that linger for so long afterward and remembers what Jinyoung did. 

What was always off between them.

He lets those moments flood over him now, pure surrender draining through his limp cheeks. All those moments when he had whispered the word as admonishing praise over Jinyoung’s tilted smile, gasped it out as shaking praise as Jinyoung did wonderful, filthy, _perfect_ things to him—and he finally realizes just how much he messed up.

It had been there behind Jinyoung’s eyes, ever since they had paused on Jaebeom in those 3 am studio mirrors, ever since Jaebeom had watched him turn so innocently to the camera through the TV screen.

Jinyoung had been looking at him, always, and Jaebeom could never understand until now.

He hides his eyes behind his fingers, feeling them pulse and shift erratically. Alone, in the wetness behind his lids, he can still imagine Jinyoung’s eyes on him. 

_what have you done to me (oh, it’s crazy)_

The first click sounds. Jaebeom registers it, an instinctual jump at the back of his mind, so deep a memory, he doesn’t realize why it makes his heart pause. 

Following, a knock.

Jaebeom, despite everything, everything wrong and screaming to drag himself back to bed and call 119, rises and goes to turn the second lock. Habit, an anticipatory motion, nothing more than catching his breath in the moment where he should have kept running. 

Jinyoung smiles up at him with his hair loosened over his smooth eyes, and Jaebeom can’t think.

“Jaebeom-ah, I missed you.”

…

Jinyoung ruts into him, where they’ve fallen at the cold tile of the doorstep when Jaebeom’s hands latched onto his coat. Hard enough to punch, to push away – to pull him in further.

Jaebeom cries into his crossed arms, face scraped raw beneath the wet tears, snot, and heavy knit cotton of Jinyoung’s sweater. He suffocates himself with every other breath, but he can’t look at Jinyoung. His legs fall open anyway, ingrained habit, the desire to please despite shame, _for shame_ , coming to haunt him at the worst moment. 

Jinyoung pleads, begs in that murmured tone of his as he works their cocks together in one hand, rough and dragging without rhythm. In that aching, rasping touch, with the softest cotton weight muffling his mouth, Jaebeom feels pleasure torn from him like a knife twisting in his gut. 

“Hyung, please--” a huff of breath over his chin, a kiss Jaebeom shudders away from. “I just wanted to see you after so long.” 

“I, don’t,” Jaebeom tries to speak, but it comes out wrong, weak with needy tears. “Don’t want to see you ever again.”

“Then,” Jinyoung hushes him, the most gentle, dangerous edge, “what did I do this for?”

Jaebeom curls even tighter into himself. He hates the drag of his pants around his knees, the pulsing pause of Jinyoung’s cock over his own. Jinyoung’s fingers circle his burning skin, patient and familiar. 

In the end, he doesn’t know. He’s still this pathetic for Jinyoung’s touch. He presses his wrist into his nose and wishes he could just choke. 

“Don’t be like this Jaebeom.” A dip in his low tone, lilting annoyance that used to be enough of a tease to make Jaebeom fluster, appeased.

Now it’s too deep, all too clear what Jinyoung wanted when he told Jaebeom to open himself up before him. _Everything_ is not something that he can take back.

He drags Jaebeom’s arm from his face. Unwillingly, desperately, Jaebeom lets him, inch by inch until his shoulder aches from how long he’s held out. The bruise Jinyoung leaves forces him to give into that deeply numbing feeling. 

“Don’t cry, I love you, you know.”

Jaebeom sobs openly and his thighs clench around Jinyoung’s waist, shaking helplessly at the sincerity of those cruel words. He looks into Jinyoung’s eyes and Jinyoung looks back, wanting and nothing more. 

_i resent the idea of you quite a lot now_

In the aftermath of bruises circling his thighs and a sharp ache at the base of his spine that ruins any possibilities of sleeping on his back, Jaebeom understands that Jinyoung isn’t simply going to leave him behind.

Jinyoung doesn’t try to visit again, nor does he take the numerous easy chances to force Jaebeom to see him at work. The distance stretches between them though, long into late afternoons where Jaebeom peeks hesitantly at the sunset bleeding through his closed blinds.

His nights are quiet as his cats creep into bed beside him. Still, he’s left breathing out on an exhale that never quite eases him to sleep.

It feels like trying to wait out the inevitable, wincing away even when he knows the elastic band is pulled to its limit. Anticipating the small rush of air, _snap_ , only for the stored tension to result in the most violent of backlashes.

The feeling of Jinyoung outside the space of his life haunts Jaebeom.

It’s hands on his waist that would pull him back from bumping into the counter in the rush of boiling morning coffee. The trim felt jacket lining Kunta’s oversized cat-bed, something he had lifelessly tugged at before letting it go again to beseeching green eyes. Black fashion lenses he had found thrown behind the couch, now skewed at the nose bridge.

He’s still there, settled just beneath Jaebeom’s skin.

Jaebeom glances past the few growing shadows on the hazy street and checks the second lock, listening for the hard _click_ before twisting it into place again.

-

He hasn’t seen Jackson in what feels like months. In truth, it’s only been weeks.

But Jaebeom still jumps at the unabashedly loud voice, a worried “hyung!” shocking him out of the lull of afternoon silence between practice sessions.

He tries his best to smile, to forget the way his body had seized up, a second of pure instinct. “Jackson – it’s you.“

“Of course it’s me,” Jackson whines, crowding close for his usual hug. “Who else would you be expecting?”

Jaebeom only manages to return it awkwardly, one arm limp at his side, the other coming up to pat loosely at the shorter man’s shoulder as Jackson clings around him. It doesn’t feel good, but it’s Jackson who never stopped texting him despite Jaebeom’s short replies, Jackson who still douses himself in too-strong cologne. He’s warm enough that it’s not bad in the moment.

Jackson pulls back quickly, running a hand through his hair. Jaebeom is caught breathless by how similar it is to Jinyoung’s actions, a little brasher and more embarrassed.

“I mean, I guess Jinyoungie, but -,” Jackson’s mumble stops mid-way because surely he sees the look on Jaebeom’s face. Jaebeom can feel it, unable to blink, to make his lips move somehow through the automatic terror.

“What, I,” Jackson’s hands come up gently, his eyes wide and genuine, yet understanding nothing, “I thought you guys made up.”

“Is that,” Jaebeom falters at how his voice sounds. Barely there, rasping with smoke and empty fear.

He tries again, at clearing his throat, at getting a hold of himself. “Is that what he told you?”

“No!” Jackson immediately protests, defensive for whatever reason. Then, he ducks away, slightly repentant with a flat pout. “He doesn’t really talk to me anyway.”

“I just thought,” Jackson struggles, and Jaebeom should say something, take it back, ask Jackson to forget it, but he suddenly needs to know just exactly what Jinyoung has been doing in the terrible aftermath of this still searing garbage fire between them. If he’s as much of a burning mess as Jaebeom is right now even though he was the one to light the match. 

“He just looks happy is all,” Jackson finishes, oddly guilty in his confusion.

_So that’s it._

Jaebeom wears a tight smile and brushes off Jackson’s hurried apologies and questions with barely a twitch of his lips, until the younger man finally leaves with a promise to not bring up Jinyoung again.

It’s not until afternoon wears into the sunset trails of evening in his quiet apartment that Jaebeom finally loosens the tight, painful knot inside his throat.

He screams into the couch cushions at the realization of it, of Jinyoung waiting for him to hurt even further with a poised tilt of his chin, that charming gap in his smile, nothing but amusement in the corner of his eyes –

He smothers everything away, deep enough, for long enough, until it’s only the raw heaving sounds of his breathing, the leftover burn filling his throat. The scratchy wetness pressed into his cheeks. The echoing resolve of something empty in his ears.

Jinyoung had wanted to see him hurt, and it’s Jaebeom’s fault for letting him get this far. For asking for his bruises, to the point that he can’t do anything else but press into the aching crevice of his hip and cry out from the twinging pain that leaves him so messed up afterwards. 

Messed up—and so is Park Jinyoung, nothing close to perfect, and it’s Jaebeom’s fault for ever telling him otherwise.

_pull the trigger and run_

The first click yanks Jaebeom out of his doze with the deafening efficiency of a startled gunshot.

He’s quick enough to get a hand on the door, but he pauses. An aching horror keeps him from locking it again, from attempting any other futile action, because the key turns a second time.

Catch. Then, a jolt of pressure. The smooth grating spin as the lock unwinds from a practiced external motion.

Jaebeom has to step out of the way as the door swings open—to Jinyoung.

On the tail end of the winter season, he looks just as good with his hands tucked into a long mocha coat. His lips are pressed together in a tentative expression, a smile perhaps, with moonlight on slitted eyes.

Jaebeom blocks the entrance, one hand on the frame, his toes curling numbly at the brush of wind leaking through all the open spots.

“I didn’t know you could open the second lock.” His voice comes out steadier, harsher than he expected from the buzzing empty air in his chest, but maybe that’s better. To be too angry and overly brash in the face of someone like Jinyoung. 

Jinyoung cocks his head, and it’s still so endearing it’s uncanny. A natural charm on the quirk of his lips. “I figured out the trick.”

Jinyoung comes closer, and there is no better description for the smooth pull of his shoulders than _a threat._ “Let me in?”

“No, no, there’s _no way_ ,” Jaebeom stumbles over his words frantically. Jinyoung is right there and the distance between them is searing closed by a single line, irreparably singed at its two frayed ends.

“I told you already.” Jaebeom digs his arm into the frame, clenching his teeth so he doesn’t let the erratic spikes of anger fade into Jinyoung’s quiet stillness.

“I told you, I don’t want to see you again.”

Jinyoung steps closer, and Jaebeom can only watch as his hand, marble bone in the moonlight, reaches out for his own. “But you also said that I could do anything. Everything.”

Jinyoung’s fingers loosen his stiffened, stubby knuckles from the door to fit them so delicately between his own.

For one dizzying moment, Jaebeom recalls the tenderness of Jinyoung’s hands pressing against his temple, his lips, his stomach as if he knew just what Jaebeom needed in every moment that they were together. Bruises so deep, a light touch had made him shiver. They pull gently and Jaebeom almost falls. 

“You need me Jaebeom.”

Jaebeom yanks away, _burned_.

“I don’t need you, and if you think that, you’re, you’re wrong. I – just, Jinyoung don't touch me--“

He doesn’t know what he’s saying, but it’s spilling out, and Jinyoung’s eyes are turning in the glimmering dark, the whiplash of a rattlesnake's scales. Jaebeom is terrified, so terrified, and yet he’s delirious with the burning swell of his tongue that for once, he wants to be the one to push too far past the jagged edge of the cliff.

Jinyoung stills, a strange ripple going through him. Then –

“I’m not perfect yet, but I’ll keep trying.” Jinyoung eyes are as soft and sincere as they’ve ever been. Cotton wrapped in endlessly black night, he comes close enough to graze his mouth against Jaebeom’s.

“-For you.”

Jaebeom releases that final broken breath because as much as it hurts him, he hopes he can ruin everything for Jinyoung too. “You’re not. I don’t care what you do, you’ll never be - I don’t need someone like _you_.”

He raises his curled fingers, a brash separation between their mouths. There’s the distinct taste of blood scabbed over on his lips. Jinyoung’s bright, black eyes flash above the edge of his knuckles.

“You’re too messed up Jinyoung.”

For a moment, there is nothing to his face. His face with sloping cheeks. They cut sharply when taken from a side profile, but soften into a peach-pink curve if you look from the back. Here, slashed across by cold pale light, nothing.

His jaw clenches down now, the corded muscle popping out like it did whenever he smiled wide enough. Endearing in an uneven, flawed picture. 

Adorable, endearing, handsome, any combination of words that Jaebeom had loved about him. _Perfect. Wrong._

Now there is no smile, only that tight, jumping tick. Jaebeom can’t recognize the look in his black, widened eyes.

Jaebeom shudders through every inch of his being, collapsing back on his doorstep. This is the elastic snap, the inevitability of each forward motion returning on its backward swing, energy converted and resolved in its final combustion.

“Are you going to kill me too, Jinyoung?” 

The expression on Jinyoung’s face is a selfish, terrible, _beautiful_ thing.

* * *

_in love with you as i am, i’ve been doing just fine_

Jaebeom slowly mumbles through the line of _hiragana_ on the glowing overhead of the subway carriage.

_Asakusa Line 17 departing next to Korakuen. Departing next to Korakuen, Asakusa Line 17._

The automated female voice announces this much more fluently, but Jaebeom catches _Asakusa 17,_ and he knows he’s on the right track at least.

His Japanese is barely improving with every stilted exchange over market-side produce. The spry grandmas still manage to push half the money back into his hands despite (or because of) his very broken protests.

At least Yugyeom wrote out clear directions, complete with scrawled icons of signs and places to make up for his clunky _kanji_. Jaebeom smiles at the Korean at the bottom of the page: _don’t get lost, hyung~_ and then the slightly neater Japanese translation right by it, hyung replaced by a cheeky _sensei~_ instead.

Yugyeom had rambled in a wave of exhaustive Korean the first time they had met. Now, he switches in and out of casual Japanese with every other sentence just to make Jaebeom struggle. 

_Brat_ , he thinks fondly to himself, smoothing through the crinkles of the little note. His thumb pauses again at the corner to trace the grooves of the two dots that are supposed to be twin moles on a grinning miniature of his face.

“Over here, Jaebeom hyung– _sensei_ ,” Yugyeom spots him immediately, a fluffy bean sprout bobbing above the milling crowd.

“Why can’t you just speak one language normally,” Jaebeom moans, but he lets Yugyeom take him by the arm with that excitable, puppy eagerness that Jaebeom secretly finds so refreshing.

Yet deeply familiar.

He tries to not think of that anymore. The high-end bustle of the idol scene with its four-sides of glistening studio mirrors is something he forgets a little bit of each time he rides through the small, busy town streets with the open coast leading the way. The faces with dewy fresh foundation and curled hair eventually smear into the muggy summer mirage too.

“ _A monk for just three days is not a monk_ ,” Yugyeom hums, nodding to himself like he’s learned the world’s most indecipherable secret.

“And what does that mean?” Jaebeom grumbles, trying to shake Yugyeom’s grip a little looser.

“It means, you should learn your proverbs Beom- _sensei._ ” Yugyeom only uses his wobbly stick legs to lean harder into him, and Jaebeom must really be getting old if he can’t throw someone as lanky as Yugyeom off.

Maybe he purposefully lets Yugyeom cuddle against his arm, a bloom of spring freshness and the smell of plastic stationery.

“I’m almost thirty, why should I learn your college proverbs-“

Yugyeom laughs his hitching, squawking laugh, and eventually, he explains when Jaebeom pokes ruthlessly at his side, demanding respect for seniority.

Jaebeom knows Yugyeom looks up to him. Figuratively. Now, he literally gazes down at Jaebeom with something like shy adoration reminiscent of honest sunshine in his crinkled eyes. 

Jaebeom still catches glimpses of Jinyoung on scrolling billboard signs. A flash of his styled hair, the corner of his watching stare, and then gone. He remembers Jinyoung telling him about management planning a Japanese album, and from the smooth yet foreign syllables that make him turn on the spot in passing, it seems he’s done well for himself in these last two years.

Jaebeom will never understand why Jinyoung let him go that night. He tries not to think about it.

Yugyeom whines that he’s spacing out again on their dance date. Jaebeom kneads harshly into the back of his neck and tells him to watch his word choice.

He’s not ready for anything like that, but Yugyeom wriggles, satisfied in his grip, and it’s easy for Jaebeom to coddle him after that with a bit of habitual roughness.

(Park Jinyoung is not someone he can forget about. Not someone he can make himself let go of even with a sea and shore separating them)

Instead, he allows Yugyeom to circle his fingers loosely around his wrist because it’s easier to not think of Jinyoung at all.

_it’s us_

Jaebeom taps his feet idly in his shoes at the wooden landing that ends a few tiles away from the doorstep.

He checks his phone, and he’s right. The weather for _Kamakura_ says it’s simply too hot to be waiting outside on a day like this. Spring to summer, the weeks have been swelling with unbearable heat with no foreseeable end in sight. No promise of shade in grey rain clouds or dimmer skies.

Just a kind of growing mugginess that makes his skin itch with anticipation of some sort.

A knock. Finally - Jaebeom was starting to sweat under the thin collar of his t-shirt.

He strides to the door, throwing it open in a flash of cicada cries and sunlight. “Kim Yugyeom, text me the next time you’re –”

Jinyoung stands there in the brilliance of blue summer refracted over twisted telephone poles and squared neighborhood edges. He wears a yellow button-up that flares out below the cinched waist tie and spotless white beach trousers.

His hair is barely shorter, a little cleaner, but there’s still the signature swept-back crown, leaving one broad curl to end just above his eyes.

His eyes that have always been fixed on Jaebeom.

“-late.”

The forgotten end of his sentence slips out as Jinyoung pushes into him. Like falling, but with a controlled gentle hush, as one hand finds the curve of his waist, the other cradling his clammy cheek to Jinyoung’s neck.

That heavy palm, with its weight that fits against the soft spot under Jaebeom’s jaw, it holds him still in its entirety.

“I told you, Jaebeom, I’d try for you.”

The summer heat plasters between their cheeks, spilled blood on both sides, and Jaebeom claws at Jinyoung’s back, hearing the gunshot recoil of elastic tension finally give way between them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> twist! nyoungie-murder. actually i started writing this fic cause i was thinking about jy being so sleek and composed with his hair and eyes and clothes. and then it turned into huh wouldn't that make for a great murder aura? anyway, thank you for reading this odd fic, i hope you weren't caught too off guard (or you were but it felt consistent at least haha).  
> venus in the blindspot is taken from the name of junji ito's newest manga collection. jinyoung during the art date is quoting Karl Ove Knausgård.  
> uh please let me know if you enjoyed? or maybe that's not the right word, if you were shocked, or anything!  
> cc: [*](https://curiouscat.me/happycakecries)  
> twitter: [*](https://twitter.com/happycakecries)


	2. jinyoung

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> could only be the end of me (it’s always been you)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now that the cat's out of the bag...for prime dubious jinyoung chapter experience, please loop feel good by irene&seulgi as you read. and also maybe look at the lyrics :)
> 
> tw: previous experience of sexual assault

_my eyes on you_

Jinyoung meets Jaebeom without much thought, much expectation.

With slight, curling interest.

Slouched by his manager, there’s barely a flicker of his eyes as Jinyoung enters, catching the door. Then, they pause on him again.

He holds himself with a fullness when he offers Jinyoung a hand, a confidence that says he knows the breadth of his own shoulders, the strong curve of his legs. Yet, he seems happy to fit into the blank wash of studio lights, the refracted background of enclosed mirrors.

When Jaebeom’s curved eyes meet his, it’s open, direct. He looks at Jinyoung with a natural, beckoning attraction.

_“JB. Let’s work well together.”_

Jinyoung thinks he’d like to see the version of himself there, reflected in the space of that stare.

-

Jinyoung’s curiosity catches on something like a shuddering breath in the dark when Jaebeom pushes him beyond simple interest.

_“Maybe pretend it’s someone. A partner,"_

Jinyoung can’t help but watch him move, and then, with the same compulsion, he returns Jaebeom’s stare in the mirror. Jinyoung wonders if Jaebeom understands what he’s saying with his body, when he had closed his eyes and seemingly invited Jinyoung’s hands to the curve of his hips. If what he’s asking for is what Jinyoung truly wants.

He wonders what Jaebeom saw in his eyes as he had glanced away, shifting a little on the cold laminate floor.

Ironically, the way he had shied away stays stuck with Jinyoung during promotions. He sings those same lyrics with the choreography just as practiced, but when he finishes each stage, he imagines Jaebeom is watching through the fishbowl lens. 

Idol news outlets write about his eye-contact ending, and he hopes Jaebeom saw. He had wanted it to be as intense as that 3 am pause, where perhaps Jaebeom had mistaken his intentions.

Mistaken or simply lost, unaware in the static haze of overhead lights and pulse of the empty stereo system. It’s not like him to linger on indecision, Jinyoung thinks, turning over the impulse in his head.

But then, he brings his first-win bouquet and he _knows_. Jaebeom was watching with the same high pink flush on his cheeks, slim eyes creased into a kind of starstruck surprise. It’s genuinely sweet, enough for Jinyoung to linger on it, wincing with a smile through the morning sun. 

Jaebeom makes the same open expression under the flickering streetlights, where Jinyoung had first watched him pass by through the slitted window of his lone studio room.

This time with an added curl of hesitation on his lashes, but as if he’s waiting, wanting for Jinyoung to push into him first.

He had been so vulnerable then, Jinyoung almost kissed him, spilled yogurt on his finger, almost, almost between their lips.

So he does, he does days later, splaying his fingers around Jaebeom’s bare neck, pulling him down so that there’s nowhere else to look but at Jinyoung’s eyes. And even though Jaebeom kisses him first, it’s Jinyoung’s hands locked into the smooth crook of his jaw, keeping him there in the empty studio long after.

It could be this easy, he tells himself on the breathy puffs of laughter falling from Jaebeom’s swollen lips. It could be, he thinks with an unfamiliar ache below his ribs as he gazes up at the open adoration in Jaebeom’s eyes.

_close up on my smooth hair, my black eyes_

There’s a slight cut on his bottom lip. Jinyoung touches the softened, peeling edges of it with a finger, and in the mirror, he sees how the plush skin beneath starts to fill up.

He bites down, tentative at first, then more, deeper. The two white indents of his front teeth seem so round and hard against his torn, red mouth. The blood almost swells over to the point of a bruise.

A few strands of hair fall into his eyes from the minute tremors of his cheeks. Jinyoung flicks them back into place with a brisk hand, and then, pauses before his flat bangs. Perhaps, he should wear them looser, messier.

Jaebeom had wanted him the most then, breathless, lodged inside his numb body, hard from the soaking heat of the storm. He always looks at Jinyoung with an indescribable need even in the messy moments after Jinyoung had let him come over his pink-tinged mouth, smear the rest with rough, cautious fingers through his hair.

Jaebeom likes to be the one to mess up his hair, ruin his mouth red like this. So instead Jinyoung smooths the last curl into place above his eyes, as neat and natural as possible. A pair of round black frames go over them to soften the edges.

Looking in the mirror, Jinyoung touches the twitching corner of his eye. A slight frown appears - he presses it away insistently a second later. He smiles and it looks real with skin-deep creases, just the way it does when Jaebeom gapes down at him with an adoring sigh.

Never tiring, whether he says it aloud each time or not, Jaebeom always tells him he’s perfect.

_on everything you want, all of me, i’ll be your perfect 10_

Management wants him to smile for the entire shoot, a summer package that’s supposed to be about lighthearted melancholy and sharing umbrellas under lightly drenched bus stops.

Smile harder, Jinyoung. You look so perfect. 

Jaebeom tells him the same thing when his eyes crease deep enough to hurt, so Jinyoung keeps it up for the entire day – and then a little longer. He’s staying over at Jaebeom’s for the night, after all.

Seeing Jaebeom at the door, so eager to be with him, surely expecting Jinyoung to smile even more earnestly in return – Jinyoung can’t keep it together. He slips.

There and then, he asks for one concession because he can pull himself back together after this. The lines of his lips, his hair, the corner of his eyes will settle into place.

But then. Then, Jaebeom begs for Jinyoung to fuck him, to _hurt_ him. He doesn’t tell Jinyoung to be perfect, he tells Jinyoung to do _anything_ , _everything_ instead and Jinyoung –

Jinyoung is willing to truly do anything because Jaebeom wants it. Because Jaebeom’s eyes roll back into his head like he _needs_ it. Needs Jinyoung’s palm digging into his stomach, needs Jinyoung to be the one to push him past an accidental swell of a hickey to the point of burst veins over bone. His fingers press into the dip of Jaebeom’s throat, and Jaebeom makes the sound of a hitched breath, like he would choke on it if Jinyoung asked him to.

And Jinyoung, holding Jaebeom on his knees, unable to let go, to see anything other than the pathetic need in his eyes, thinks, _perfect_ , in return.

_all i can see is you_

His manager dismisses him with flat eyes that never truly look at him. For the first time, Jinyoung panics.

He panics, blinking through the empty blur of subway cars, the crowd of blurred gazes that slide past as he struggles to feel his shoulder under the limp body. He can’t feel his own breath in his chest at Jaebeom’s doorstep, rising mutely to the cacophony of mewls.

Jaebeom hesitates, but he trusts Jinyoung with that implicit vulnerability in his slight eyes.

The calm settles after Jinyoung drops the body to the floor. There is nothing in his mind, only the exact pinpoint moment of tension and release as he heaves the microwave up in a rush of falling, forward motion. It’s too loud, but soon enough the ringing settles into his ears as well.

He wipes at his face with a sleeve, and the cuff edge comes away clean.

Jaebeom makes all these strange, broken noises. His body falls and rises again with so much twisting through his wide, flickering eyes. Beyond the panic that spins out further – _why, jinyoung, why_ – he looks at Jinyoung like he never knew him. It’s so much at once, yet not enough.

Jinyoung is kicked into the cabinets from the backlash of Jaebeom pushing off of him. He’s not calm, not even in the slightest, but Jaebeom is sobbing uncontrollably against his palms, and _it’s such an expression_.

The dumbfounded daze suits him, Jinyoung thinks.

There’s blood on his hands, blood now mixing into the creases of Jaebeom’s shut eyes. His lips shudder open, pink smeared red on glossy spit, and Jinyoung wonders what it tastes like. What he would taste like now if Jinyoung kissed him.

Jinyoung is filled with a dizzying, delirious thrill. Jaebeom crying so helplessly because of him is better than anything Jinyoung has ever seen. 

Jaebeom’s fingers rip hard streaks of blood through Jingyoung’s shirt even as his eyes roll back. Like he knows he still needs him, despite everything he’s done, despite Jinyoung being the one to make him like this.

And Jinyoung catches him, stops him from falling all the way down. He thinks of everything, of anything that could come after this. Jaebeom’s already cried, choked, hurt with tears and something else broken loose, prodding aches and raw flesh between them, and Jinyoung smiles gently to himself.

He folds Jaebeom’s limp, clinging arms around his neck, and despite everything, he can’t wait to see how Jaebeom will look at him now. 

_but i know, what i am_

It was an accident the first time.

(Soohyun was shooting him cruel stares with the shadow of clear intention all throughout practice. Has been for the last three months whenever Jinyoung stayed alone through the night, only to return in the morning to find him passed out on the bench by the mirror. Tight shoulders, big ears, and his back turned to the door, unaware.

He’s been expecting something like this for a while now, Soohyun cornering him on the tall landing facing the dirty alleyway. A spot blocked by the sole overhead light and too old and useless to have any security cameras installed anyway.

Soohyun yanks hard at his cropped hair. Jinyoung doesn’t like it, but it’s not a surprise when the older boy tries to get him on his knees.

“Come on Park, do something useful with that mouth at least—"

The moths buzz, throwing themselves into the static pulse of electricity. Jinyoung’s knees ache.

He not thinking when he surges forward, knocking Soohyun away with a knobby elbow to the gut.

Jinyoung doesn’t have a lot of strength. He hasn’t eaten since swallowing down a meager yogurt drink this morning. But it seems like that was enough to see Soohyun’s eyes topple back in an arcing flash of streetlight before – _thump_.

Jinyoung scrambles to the railing, but it’s the 7th floor and too dark for him to make out anything. Despite that, he thinks the blurred shape has gone still.

“Jinyoung, what are you doing out here?” The slider door rattles across its grooves, and Jackson pops his head out. He stares, worried, at Jinyoung’s crouched, draped posture, and moves as if to step through the door.

“Nothing.” Jinyoung doesn’t think about anything else as that odd calm settles deep inside his arms. The same numb exhaustion he feels from dancing but with it, a jittering, thrilling undercurrent. 

He pushes Jackson back through the door, slamming it shut behind them.

Later, he pants, collapsed alone again on the practice floor. The sweat soaks across his scalp, and he closes his eyes, still feeling the bags there like bruises on his sensitive skin. Tomorrow, a weight check before management visits, then vocal training, followed by dance until he manages to steal away for some cheap _kimbap_ , and then more routines to run through. 

Soohyun had fallen with barely a breath. Jinyoung wonders why it can’t be that easy with everything else). 

That was then.

He didn’t mean it.

This is now.

He doesn’t regret it.

Jaebeom is everything to him. He doesn’t mind being called perfect, for it to hurt minutely in the corner of his eyes every time he has to keep his smile even.

Now, he gets to see how much it ruins Jaebeom in return.

_why can’t i stop, the more you’re hurt_

_“Are you going to kill me too, Jinyoung?”_

Jinyoung takes the bus to Jaebeom’s apartment block in the early hours of morning past midnight after he locks his studio room. He thinks those words over, the blustering fear in Jaebeom’s eyes as he had stood by his door, opened for Jinyoung for the last time. Jaebeom’s shades are drawn in the window facing the street, but little slats of bright light peak through the kitchen filter at the corner of the building.

He would never. Not even if Jaebeom begged pitifully with tears in the way that Jinyoung has asked of him so many times before. 

So why is it – Jinyoung huffs a breath that fogs up the view of blurred streetlights. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches a shadow shift behind the thin blinds. Blink and it could have been the rasp of his own lashes.

So why is it that he still hopes to see the bare cruelty in Jaebeom’s eyes again? He should let go, but he doesn’t understand. As much as he was hurt, as much as he had let himself believe he was truly something perfect for Jaebeom - he wants to smile and see Jaebeom hurt in return. 

Jinyoung doesn’t blame him, could never regret how he’d waited for Jaebeom’s arms to fall around him and for those meaningless words to follow after with a kind of ingrained need. But at least a part of him is sure that Jaebeom was the one who made him like this. 

Too much of a mess, he had grit out through his teeth, the sound of it burning something to smoke between them. Jinyoung had seen him stumble back, fall, tremble with that twisted, reaching desperation, and he had thought: _you too._

Smiling until the corners of his eyes are even and the rest of his face is lax, he has to bite back the sharp thrill on his tongue. Messed up and perfect enough to want to see the flickering pain in Jaebeom’s eyes again. 

_always us_

_Departing Asakusa Station. Korakuen up ahead._

Jinyoung has a showcase scheduled at a decently sized venue 30 minutes out from Tokyo. That’s tomorrow’s business.

But today, he practices his Japanese with neatly smiling train attendants who laugh, slightly disbelieving, when he tells them he’s just a beginner. Joking now, he waves them off with a cordial tilt of his head. 

It was true, he recalls, propping himself up to watch the busy concrete edges of the city fade into blooming trees on wide, strolling streets. At least it was when he had forced Jaebeom into the remarkably short stint of learning the language together, a staggering one month before Jaebeom began responding to every _ohayō_ with a lazy _annyeong._

Jinyoung thinks of those mornings and other slight memories in these between moments often now. Especially in Japan.

He’s here to take pictures of and in _Korakuen_ today, something he had suggested for his simple interest in the garden. Management allows it as a potential accompaniment to the album, so here he is, on his way through the park, letting occasional shutter bursts of Jaebeom’s smile startle him from behind the viewfinder.

Then, he startles again. A bit of a whine, prolonged enough to carry over the breezy murmur of the crowd, but not a necessarily annoying interruption. Jinyoung turns to see a young man, tall enough to be distinct from the slight distance between them.

Fluffy hair, like dandelion down, that brushes into his eyes. The smooth, oval curve of his face is distinctly Korean.

Jinyoung hears the wide, uncontrolled, choking hiccups of laughter before he actually sees _him_.

Jaebeom is at the young man’s side, and Jinyoung realizes he’s gasping out broken Korean at the flood of rapid-fire Japanese. The dandelion-haired kid demonstrates a dance move with his flailing arms crossing at an awkward angle, one over the other. Jaebeom immediately repeats it in that effortlessly lax way Jinyoung has never been able to follow, and bursts into laughter again.

Jaebeom has changed his hair. Sleek, minimal bangs with a lighter, longer edge that shows off the bare sides of his neck. He looks different, sharper, older, but his smile is the same. He throws his head back, and there’s no pain at all to the sunshine crease of his eyes, the wide stretch of his lips around his front teeth. He finishes laughing just the same, almost biting, sucking at his bottom lip in an attempt to hold himself back from spilling over again. 

Jinyoung has wondered all this time, if Jaebeom had thought of him. If Jaebeom had seen the promotional images of Jinyoung plastered across glossy subway boards, if he had heard the short snippets of Jinyoung’s practiced interviews on scrolling radio channels. 

He had always wondered what kind of face Jaebeom would make. If he would look towards these empty facades, just as desperate and hurt and still needing more somehow.

Tomorrow, he has a showcase scheduled at a nicely packed venue to thank his long-time fans. A seven-set song list with two ments in between. After that is Osaka, then back to working on an upcoming Korean drama.

Now, he forgets about all of it, the showcase tomorrow, the photobook pictures today, because this— _this_ is pure serendipity.

His eyes flicker naturally into twitching, uneven whiskers. It’s been so long, it feels good. Jinyoung can’t wait to see what kind of face Jaebeom will make.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yugyeom was hitting the woah if that was not clear. i would also laugh a little at that.  
> kinda unrelated but here was the music experience of this fic: looped nostalgic night by victon for ch.1 and feel good by i&s for ch. 2. how much did the tones of these songs line up with their respective chapters? ch.1, barely and ch.2, exactly (or at least I hope so). writing jy pov was something i felt very murky about until i looked at the lyrics for feel good by i&s, so a lot of his characterization is the _as much as i'm hurt, i hope you're hurt too_ kinda vibe.  
> this fic man phew, been stewing in my head for a while. just hints of creeping shadow and smoke, but the moment i started writing it, it was kind of a violent and crashing experience - devolved as quickly as the relationship b/t jjp. anyway i don't think i knew how volatile and dangerously needy i would end up writing these two, but in the end here they are, an inevitably bad relationship. well, in retrospect i should also apologize for leading any of you to think that this chapter would be a "continuation" of the end in ch.1. i felt that those last lines were really the end for them - after all, what else could happen? i leave the details up to you :)  
> admittedly i've always wanted to write a murder plot-twist? and this jy is just, oogh, he's something. it was def self-indulgent but i had some exhaustive fun talking about how uncanny and pretty jy is haha.  
> i think one last thought to wrap up the relationship b/t these two would be this lyric from psycho (red velvet) which gave me the inspo for the title of this fic:  
>  _"people keep telling us...that it's our last...they don't get it, it's so funny."_  
>  anyway thank you for reading through this quick piece! i hope you were able to enjoy it on some level and please let me know what you thought of it! any thoughts are welcome!
> 
> cc: [*](https://curiouscat.me/happycakecries)  
> twitter: [*](https://twitter.com/happycakecries)


	3. post-addendum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't mind me, just a snippet originally from twt and im moving it here

_hush, and say good morning and good night to our daily domesticity_

jaebeom wakes at 8 am. he shakes off the immediate morning chills, a perpetual effect of summer at the ocean coast, and crawls out of the futon spread from his side. 

it’s routine now that the other side of the bed is a neat space in the shape of a missing body, and he tries to not disturb it. smoothing a hand over the futon wrinkles, breathing in the remaining traces of shampoo and curling heat - he turns away quickly. 

he sways on his feet, rubbing a hand over his eyes. six hours this time if he actually fell asleep at 2. it’s not bad, but he’s never awake before _him_. 

his phone beeps, and the clock at the pillow reads a glaring 8:40. jaebeom flips it over sharply before folding desperately onto his haunches. he breathes in and out, nose muffled by his clammy skin, flashes of light pulsing behind his eyes. 

when he can feel the spindly length of each _tatami_ strip press into his feet, he checks the clock again. 

9:00. save for the birds and bicycle calls outside, it’s still quiet in the house. 

he supposes it’s time for a shower. 

-

he flips an egg idly as he tilts his head into the towel at his neck. some leftover water leaks out on a rush of warmth, and he digs at the wet sensation with a finger.

the egg whites sizzle on excess butter, most likely burnt. jaebeom doesn’t think this one is as much of a failure as the last few, but cooking has never been his strong suit. not even for the past two years, living in a country where he can barely speak the language. 

it seems like he’d been settled on his own for such a long while.

the echo of the single lock turns, right around the corner. jaebeom freezes with the towel over one ear. 

the gas stove clicks and spits at awkward intervals, the flames searing without control into the tiny pan bottom. 

the egg crumples from the heat, but jaebeom can’t move. his hair, overgrown at this point, drips into his eyes, down his neck and into his shirt, and he’s shaking from a distant, sweltering part inside him. it’s so foreign, it’s numb, but he is reminded of the familiarity of falling back into a pool, wide and weightless enough for it to spread through him, forget, and repeat for an eternity. 

jinyoung sets the bags down. he wraps a hand around jaebeom’s nape, settling his palm for a single moment, before tilting jaebeom’s head gently to him for a quick peck on the cheek. 

jaebeom averts his eyes. jinyoung’s fingers soothe into the curve of his neck, pulling him back. 

“jaebeom-ah,” he says gently, patiently, “you’re burning breakfast.” 

his other hand switches off the stove _. click_. the fire splutters with a few last bursts of blue and retreats into the flat grill. 

the egg is a shriveled mess, laced with caramelized brown traces over tacky whites and barely enough running yolk. it pops with a hidden bubble of oil that hadn’t gone out with the heat. 

jinyoung worms the pan handle out from jaebeom’s locked grip. in the morning sun seeping through the window, his eyes glitter above his smile. his fingers remain tangled, intimately, over jaebeom’s soaked nape.

“mm, good morning to you too.” 

-

jinyoung forks tiny bites of egg into his mouth along with the freshly bought steamed buns jaebeom had set out from his shopping bags. 

he’s humming something frivolous in that steady, lilting voice of his, but jaebeom doesn’t want to ask what he could be singing. he hasn’t heard jinyoung talk about idol work for months now.

he passes by the table with a handful of newly acquired trash bags, and jinyoung catches him by the hip. 

beneath his loose t-shirt, the thick waist of his baggy shorts, jinyoung’s steady, bruising fingers pull him in. jaebeom recoils, curling even further into the cradle of jinyoung’s arm. 

“here,” jinyoung offers a small forkful of egg, “you should try your own cooking.” 

jaebeom raises a hand, and jinyoung only jerks the fork back playfully. he winds his arm fully around jaebeom now, almost crowding him into his lap. jaebeom has to raise one knee onto the edge of the chair to balance in jinyoung’s hold.

there’s barely any space left where he isn’t touching jinyoung. his knee digs into jinyoung’s thigh, and against his bare skin, the heat of jinyoung’s leg through his pants is a pulsing friction. 

“-let me,” he purses his lips, smooth and full, and props the fork to jaebeom’s mouth. 

jaebeom shivers, the silver points digging into the seam of his own lips. 

jinyoung prods a little harder. “open, jaebeom.” 

the four prongs burn an interlacing space into the softness of his lower lip. jinyoung’s hand clenches harder around his hip. 

jaebeom opens with a shaking breath, and the fork slides past his teeth. the wet egg bumps into the top of his mouth, dry and choking, and when the fork slides back out, jaebeom scrapes his teeth against the grating prongs. 

he closes his mouth on the lightest catch of metal. it _clinks_ , the sharp bite of relief. 

he swallows automatically, and jinyoung’s eyes are on him again, the bob of his throat, his parted lips. 

“good, right?” jinyoung smooths away the sheen of butter from the corner of his lips.

“not really,” jaebeom mumbles, still distinctly aware of jinyoung’s hand tucked like a brand in the aching bone of his hip. 

jinyoung only laughs, huffing a considering “ _hm”_ sound as he pulls jaebeom down to kiss him. their lips smear with oil and jaebeom tastes the burnt protein, something so acrid it makes vomit stir at the back of his throat. jinyoung’s hand slides to the crook of his spine, cupping the delicate bent of it, pressing down at the point of tension.

everything about their position right now, jaebeom practically hovering over jinyoung’s lap, jinyoung cradling him with a loose hold, screams a comfortable intimacy. 

he tears away, stumbling at the knee that had been dug into the chair’s edge. 

“i-” he doesn’t look at jinyoung, heels tripping on the white tile of the kitchen, smoother and cleaner than even the _tatami_ spread of the bedroom. “i’m going out.” 

“like that?” jinyoung’s gaze, lidded behind his wide glasses, slides down his body. 

“i don’t care,” jaebeom bites out in his rush to shove his bare feet into his sneakers at the tiny doorway. the rigid heels fold, well-worn and ruined by habit, and he grabs his keys from the hook. 

they ring with an urgency in his ears, but he catches one last glance of jinyoung. sprawled over the back of his chair, legs crossed in his casual slacks, one arm clutching at the wooden rungs, the other propped over his mouth. 

his languid black eyes seem to be laughing at jaebeom’s expense.

jaebeom throws open the door and doesn’t look back again. 

-

jaebeom walks the road at the edge of a cliffside that follows the seaside. a slab of metal railing is the only thing that separates the craggly sidewalk from a sharp decline of crumbling earth.

he has no idea where he’s going. he hasn’t had an idea of where to go ever since jinyoung arrived. 

if it was any other day - he pauses to gaze blearily at the yellow sun sat flat on the horizon. maybe he would be off on a bus to visit yugyeom or vice versa, with him tapping out impatient text messages to the younger man at his tiny provincial stop. 

he had told yugyeom to not come see him anymore. had been adamant in cutting everything off. when the calls still came in, he had blocked yugyeom’s number. 

(jaebeom still remembers it, area code, ten digits, the tiny dandelion emoticon, and all). 

yugyeom had managed to catch him again, surprising jaebeom half to death the moment someone had grabbed his arm during a late-night convenience store trip. 

it was one of the few moments he could remember thanking his luck, for jinyoung staying home that night. 

“yugyeom, what did i tell you-” he had hissed, crowding the younger man by his thin shoulders back into the wall outside the store. 

“i-” yugyeom starts with that pout of his, whining so earnestly. so _loudly._

jaebeom slaps a palm over his mouth, whirling around to stare into the dark. there was nothing but the buzz of white neon light reflecting the shadows of tiny gnats. but beyond that, it had been shadow. quiet and still enough for anyone to be watching, listening. 

“i told you,” jaebeom rushed over yugyeom’s confusion when he had lifted his hand, “i told you i didn’t want to see you again.” 

“but hyung,” yugyeom had started pleading in korean, staring down at jaebeom like he couldn’t understand, stuttering with these little “ _w-whys,”_ still so obstinate and _dumb_ in his affection. 

“yugyeom, you’re so needy, give me a break. if i don’t want to see you, then _i don’t want to see you_.” jaebeom had felt his own breath give way with a terrible shudder inside his chest, but he steels himself for the break, for the look in yugyeom’s eyes.

the tiny mole under yugyeom’s eye had trembled slightly. 

jaebeom stepped back once, twice, his fingertips grazing over yugyeom’s shoulder. one last trembling point of contact. “just, just stay away from me, okay?” 

he had forced himself to break into a run then, to not look back. he had hoped yugyeom would stay put and then take the midnight bus home, maybe dejected and more than a little hurt, but with a promise to forget about jaebeom in his life. 

he hasn’t seen yugyeom since, which is a good sign. he thinks what he said was enough to put a pin in yugyeom’s soft, bleeding heart. enough to show him what a broken, angry person jaebeom was. someone as good as yugyeom should never have met someone like him. 

he regrets it from the very beginning, the first time he had allowed himself to smile back if only to see yugyeom’s bright face light up even more. 

he regrets it from the very beginning because, leaning dizzily over the edge of the railing, the look in yugyeom’s eyes replays as an angry indignance through his mind. not enough lasting pain, only a blunt determination to go against everything jaebeom had asked, pleaded of him, because of course, he knows what’s best when he’s young and so cocksure of his own feelings. 

jaebeom regrets that what he said hadn’t been enough. 

jaebeom wishes he could hurt people like jinyoung does. clean, no lasting, trailing, messes. 

his own inability to push people away is going to get them all killed, he thinks, swaying hazily. the cliff face looms right below his chin.

“jaebeom- _kun_?”

jaebeom swoons backwards in a rush of hot blood and unnameable impulse. just how close had he come to falling? 

“ _o-obachan,"_

it’s one of the grannies from the market, all of their faces distinct in their heavy lines and squinted, weathered eyes, but in a nondescript way where he’s never been able to learn their names. this one has always offered him free cabbages, calling them leftovers with a stern scoff, and today is no different. 

she pulls him over with a wrinkled, hardy grip, a knowing glare in her eye. “ _what exactly were you thinking of doing_?”

jaebeom awkwardly bends to accommodate her height- that and her tiny pinpoint fingers. “ _nothing, nothing i was just dozing off, obachan."_

she gives him a clearly unimpressed look before launching into a long tirade that jaebeom only manages to catch snippets of. in the midst of something about _never visiting_ , _disrespect,_ and _weekly sales_ , there is the distinct sound of jinyoung’s name. 

she presses her rustling bag of tall nappa cabbage into jaebeom’s hand, still caught in her clawed grip. 

“ _give these to jinyoung-kun, okay? at least he has the decency to visit us more often.”_ her eyes crinkle so fondly at his name, and her hand loosens to pat at jaebeom’s arm, as if affirming how jinyoung is the better, kinder one with his neat japanese used for sweet compliments only. 

jaebeom rests his palm on her wrinkled skin. he tries to smile in return, to show her that jinyoung is synonymous with something lighthearted, a teasing friend, a housemate. not the odd coiling fear that follows with every caught breath, every pause of his heart when jinyoung reaches out for him. 

“ _will do obachan."_

he trudges back, back the long way he came. he doesn’t remember having walked so far on his own. 

at some point, by a scraggly bush, he considers throwing the cabbages away. tossing them into the road or at the base of a tree for wild rabbits to pick out. out of pure relief from spite, perhaps, or a way to hide everything he did that day from jinyoung, to cut off the possibility of any conversation between them. 

in the end, he unlocks the door to jinyoung waiting with a ready hand. he takes the cabbages from jaebeom and smoothes his fingers over the deep, red welts that must have formed from the handles rubbing insistently into his palm. 

burning from the fever of sun and sweat, jaebeom barely feels his touch. 

-

“you had a long day without me, didn’t you jaebeom?”

jaebeom doesn’t reply, and jinyoung doesn’t seem to mind. he props open jaebeom’s limp legs, widening them further as he leans forward to kiss languidly down jaebeom’s bare neck. 

jinyoung stops at his clavicle, nosing into the dip there. a soft, breathless sigh. “i missed you.” 

jaebeom shifts back, feeling his hair spread across the single pillow on their futon. it’s gotten so long and messy again, enough for jinyoung to tangle his fingers into every chance he gets. 

jinyoung picks up with his kisses, this time grazing the soft underside of jaebeom’s chest. he thrusts gently, slowly, a bare sensation. “you’re so pretty like this,”

he pulls back and drives in again, knocking a shiver out of jaebeom, all the way from his stomach to the top of his closed throat. 

“-but, i wish you’d talk to me more.” 

jinyoung is a body of dark lines and carved edges, looming between his legs. the curve of his shoulders, to the swell of his chest, the compact trail of his abs - he’s a beautiful sight naked. he holds himself up without any trouble above jaebeom, gravitating his hips in teasing motions, and jaebeom only feels something of a numb pang give inside him. 

then, jinyoung lines up against that spot and forces a punctured cry from his lips. 

“no,” he stirs with a dry breath. the tightness in his chest is rising, pushing free, and he’s suddenly aware of jinyoung holding him down. of being trapped with nowhere to look but up, at jinyoung’s dark, handsome stare. jinyoung has never faltered all this time. 

and now - he pushes in entirely, spreading jaebeom’s thighs wide as he just stays there. sore muscles pull at jaebeom’s gut, and distinctly, he feels the weight of jinyoung’s cock jolt against his spine. 

he bats at jinyoung’s shoulders, pushing up into the smooth curves. “no more, please- ah!” and he can only let his mouth loll open, keening when jinyoung shifts his hips, pressing deeper inside him again. 

“shh,” jinyoung collapses around him on his elbows. he’s everywhere at once, thick between jaebeom’s legs, splitting him open, smothering him with his chest, his heavy arms, his curling lips. 

“i know what you need,” he pulls back barely, enough to whisper against jaebeom’s gasping mouth. “it’s okay, you don’t have to say anything more.” 

jaebeom is begging, _choking_ , when jinyoung fits his heavy palm around his throat and bears down so he can’t breathe. 

jinyoung lays over him like that, one hand cutting into the sides of his neck as he ruts his cock mercilessly into jaebeom’s numb insides. it hurts, it hurts, jaebeom thinks, feeling the core of him pulse through with an empty pleasure. 

he wraps his fingers around jinyoung’s arm and presses down desperately for more. 

“good, jaebeom,” jinyoung laughs, a roiling sound of satisfaction, even as he kneels upright, driving jaebeom into the floor as he yanks both of his wrists above his head. 

his wrists, his throat, his open hips. jaebeom can’t think, can’t breathe through the bruises that are digging into his body. but he feels it, the raw hurt scraping up his throat, jinyoung’s heavy cock dragging on the rim of his hole, and it’s only like this that he can seem to feel at all. 

jinyoung forces his thumb into the soft point beneath his chin, angling jaebeom’s head backwards into the hard _tatami_ floor. he’s bending him so far now, so close to breaking, jaebeom’s spine could snap - but jinyoung might just fuck into him harder and push him beyond even that. 

jaebeom gurgles, the outline of jinyoung’s face going fuzzy: “jinyoung, please.” 

jinyoung covers his throat with both hands now, fingers parting almost lovingly for his crushed trachea. “that’s right, you’re so good for me.” 

jinyoung chokes him through his orgasm, two hands on his neck, jaebeom’s hands on his wrists, and when he finally lets go, he swallows jaebeom’s heaving cry with his wet mouth.

there is the gasping, rushing release of breath, and beneath it, the slight hint of blood. 

later, jinyoung holds him by the back, nosing sweetly into his nape. he nudges aside a few sweaty curls with his cheek and places a kiss there. 

“good night.” 

jinyoung’s hands remain locked around jaebeom’s stomach, and every sinking feeling soaks through his touch, through jaebeom’s body, and with a kind of deafening weight, anchors into the hard _tatami_ beneath their thin summer futon. 

where can he go now, jaebeom wonders, again and again. just as he did today, almost falling over the railing of the seaside cliff. just as he did when he had to see yugyeom’s expression shutter painfully closed and he almost, almost reached out to soothe his palms over soft cheeks to say _i’m sorry, please don’t leave me behind._

just as he did the day jinyoung had slotted himself perfectly in place before his doorstep again. 

jaebeom closes his eyes, and he counts the passing hours in his sleep. 


End file.
